Tags
Wilhelm makes the occasional post about feeds, and readers, and these methods for reading blogs and keeping up on them. I’m a luddite on that score – I vaguely remember looking at one years back and asking “Why would I use this ?”. It didn’t help that it had push notifications on by default, and the VERY LAST THING I will ever use are things with push. Don’t fucking bug me, please !
But as we wait for the demise of Google reader (being cancelled on July 1st) the question begins to become what will replace it ? Those heavy into social media probably have a lot of options, but I’m holding onto my dual online life. I have the accounts with my real name, real identity, etc. And I have my online pseudonym which is, if not prohibited, downright frowned upon in the Web 2.0 world.
(As a sidenote : I have heard the rumor that some image formats preserve the original image inside of them, so that the image you post can be “uncropped”. Is this true and what format is this ? My google-fu is lacking, if this really exists.)
With all of that, here I am accessing blogs the same way you would at the beginning of the World Wide Web : Bookmarks and links. Type an address in the address bar. It works for me, and yet I am a technology guy. So with a real desire not to be an unthinking luddite, I took a look at Feedly, the highest-rated blog reader on Wilhelm’s poll.
This is Feedly
I can get behind something like this. There’s a list of stories in the center of the screen, and they have some fun categorizing them. How do they make their money from me ? There’s an ad, and a list of stuff for me to buy from Amazon.com. No large, blinking ads screaming at me. And I mark items read, or not, and get the content when I open up Feedly. As of the first 30 minutes, no push notifications have shown up in my gmail.
I don’t know how some of the sites got into this thing. Raph Koster’s website, which had a cool video about Will Wright’s first game. And someone we lost too soon, Jeff Freeman, gets listed out in here too. His mythicalblog.com is gone as you’d expect for someone who has passed away, and yet Feedly somehow has summary information about it.
Some blogs don’t want to get added in. If I recall, that’s simply the option to add an RSS feed or not, which each blog owner allows. That’s fine. But For The Record does have feeds on and yet I can’t seem to add it. The search will show it for a bare second, then it disappears. Strange.
Perhaps it’s time to use a reader. Or, way past time. Either way I suppose I’ll give this a shot and see how it goes.
