It was a lazy summer evening, I’d nothing in particular that needed urgent attention, except… the list of blogs I try to keep up with. There are desktop shortcuts to your favs (I’d abandoned that some time ago, in favour of a clearer XP desktop). There are Favourites in IE and Bookmarks in Firefox. There are Links buttons on your toolbar. In other words, there is confusion.
What am I talking about? Blog links. I glance at and/or read lots of blogs. But, it was always nagging away in the background that it’d be nice to have them all in one place. I’d tried using Outlook to read RSS updates. But, that was to much like hard work, and even looked similar to reading and dealing with the daily mountain of emails we get. I wasn’t interested in keeping up to date.
So, following a few months of giving it a little and random pondering, I’ve settled on Google Reader, for now.
Cool Features:
- Add a Subscription. This bit is extremely easy. (I tried Bloglines for a while and found options were not updated, it was slow to load and downright complicated, with no need.) Simply click the button and paste in the RSS feed and click Add. I like simple.
- Large blog titles. I work at a screen for about 60% of my time. I like high contrast options and large text options and magifying options. Click on a blog title in a feed and it is magnified a little, in blue, and displays the first paragraph or so. Simple.
- Starred blog posts. You can star a blog post, which then gets stored in your Starred folder, whether you’ve marked it as read or not. You can then read it later. Simple.
Useful Features:
- Feed Settings. This option allow you to Unsubscribe easily. If you find your ahev too many feeds, you can unsubscribe in a few clicks. Feed Settings>Unsubscribe>Confirm.
Other Features: