I love Google Reader, especially combined with iGoogle, as it allowed me to easily track new posts on the various blogs of interest to me in a nice compact format that remembers what I’ve read or not read. If the title is interesting, I can click it to open in a new window and all good. And the “mark all as read” feature is nice as well. And all accessible from any computer where I was logged into my Google account. Alas, as most of you probably know by now, Google is killing off Reader due to “not enough users” at the end of June. iGoogle is also dying, but not till the end of November (even though it’s demise was announced last year…Google’s scheduling is odd…).
My Google Reader in iGoogle – nice, simple, clean
This left me trying to find a replacement. Most of what is out there in terms of RSS feed readers are just not how I want to see stuff. Magazine layout? No thank you! Categories, clouds, tags, what have you…no, a single, simple list is fine, thanks. Desktop based? No, I need to be able to access/read from multiple computers, multiple browsers on those computers, and if I can do it from my iPad cool (though I rarely do that one, so if not, I don’t care). I saw various names floating around in all the news reports about Reader’s shut for down for viable options, but none appealed to me.
I’ve also seen some folks loudly proclaiming those who use RSS are just “old fashioned” and they wouldn’t miss it at all cause they have Twitter or whatever to find stuff. For my more polite response to that view, many of the blogs I read are smaller ones, not big mainstream company things, so they don’t do Twitter posts for every update, and frankly I HATE Twitter. I won’t use it, I won’t even read it most of the time. So no, that isn’t an option. And I’m not trying to “find” stuff, RSS feed consumption is generally for tracking what’s already been located. Sites I found interesting that have regular (or irregular) content updates that I want to know about.
Anyway, in disgust I’d pretty much decided I was just going to build my own, then I don’t have to deal with shut downs anymore. But time is starting to run short and my “to do” list in terms of personal projects is as long as it was back in January. After reading a bit more about it, I finally decided that, for now at least, I’ll switch to Feedly. I’d rejected it at first because of their pushing the whole magazine format, but I have since learned I can pretty much get a layout similar to Google Reader via iGoogle if I desire.
I went to the site and hit the “Get Feedly for Chrome” which popped in a quick plug in. No problem there. When it was done, it took me to a page with a button to connect to Google Reader, so I hit that. Moments later, wee, I have my Feedly account and some feeds. At first I was really confused, since it seemed like it had only picked up 3 of the 42 feeds I follow, but after more hunting around I found the full list of feeds it had pulled in, which was correct. So yay. It does offer categorization, but I’m just leaving all my uncategorized since I don’t care about that right now.
After playing with the settings and turning off most of the “enhanced” features and switching up the themes a bit, it’s usable and will certainly suffice for my needs. It does have some odd quirks, though. For example, on the All/Index pages, you can switch up the views between “Title Only”, “Magazine”, “Card”, and “Full Article”. For most of the views, the content loads in the main part of the site design, which seems to be fixed width. However, when I go to Title View, i.e. the one like Google Reader that I am going to use, it switches to a percentage-based design and the main content window stretches to full the browser window. For context, I have Chrome on my second monitor on the computer I’m on now, which is at a1920x1080 resolution and I have my browser maximized. I can live with it, though the sudden shift is a little visually disconcerting when literally every other aspect of the site is fixed at the same width, but it just seems like an odd thing to do for a list of text titles, but not for the image glutted magazine view, for example.
Also, if you resize the browser window down “too much”, the whole left side menu vanished behind a little button, then pops up on mouse over as an overlay on top of the content. I hate that kind of thing, but I’m guessing they are using a “responsive design” to work with mobile devices (though really, resized down to 1076×736 is considered too small?). Again, it’s tolerable since I always have my window maximized anyway.
One aspect that made me laugh out loud was the one setting asks if you want a “Giant Mark As Read” button to show at the bottom of the feed. I was like, “sure”, figuring it would be a button or something. But man, when they say Giant, they meant it! Gave me a laugh and hey, can’t say I can’t see it 🙂
“Mark as Read” button – browser window is cropped a little, but suffice to say, that is GIANT! Otherwise, close enough to what I’m used to.
I do have concerns, of course. Feedly is itself just a wrapper for Google Reader via the API. They are working on their own server-based implementation that will supposedly result in a “seamless” transition when Google Reader shuts down. If they are delayed, something borks, whatever, then I’m guessing it will just go away. The company that built it sounds confident though, and of the options I’ve seen it’s the closest to what I want, so for now I’ll take the risk. There is also the bigger risk that now that Reader is dead, and many users are switching over to Feedly, they will decide to go from free to $$. In deed, after I wrote most of this post, they added a survey about how much they should charge for it. *sigh*
Suffice to say, I’ve made a back up of my feed list from Google, just in case, though. I mean, I can live with losing my “what’s been read” data, but I would hate to lose the list of feeds. And, until it is dead, I’ll probably just keep using my iGoogle + Reader for my primary checking of my feeds.
P.S. When you click the “Get Feedly for Chrome” button, you get the Chrome App. There is also a Feedly Extension, if you prefer it (like me). Just search for Feedly and look for the Extension that is from Feedly itself.