Tag Archives: googlereader

Tech

Feedly

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Readers of this blog know I am an avid RSS reader. Specifically, I’ve used Google Reader for years but now they’re closing. People panicked – but they shouldn’t. This is just as if people had panicked when Netscape Navigator died: “the end of the web!”? No. Just use a different web browser.

I just moved my 240 feeds to feedly. So if you came here to see my detailed analysis of all the competitors then you came to the wrong place. I picked feedly because it was free and Reeder works (or will work) with it. I don’t like that it uses my Google account – I like to keep my accounts independent of each other.

Have you been affected by the Apocalypse closing of Google Reader? What have you migrated to? I’m interested to hear.

From the tubes

RIP Google Reader

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rip-google-reader

Long time The MKX® readers know that I’m a huge fan of Google Reader. What can I say, I’m a news junkie. Some things have changed though:

  1. In 2011, Google redesigned (read: crippled) Google Reader in order to better shove Google+ down our throats. Among other things, they removed link sharing. I now use Delicious exclusively for that purpose. (Hint: You can subscribe to the RSS feed of my Delicious. I subscribe to a few friends this way)
  2. While I used to use the Google Reader website directly, I no longer do that. Now I use an app called Reeder (on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac) that synchronizes to my Google Reader account. So Google Reader is no longer an RSS client for me, just a synchronization service.

Yesterday, Google announced they are shutting the service down on July 1st. Is this a personal disaster? No, for the two reasons given above.

While I understand that companies cannot give something away for free without getting anything in return (hint: it costs money to provide these sort of services), I fully expected Google to start inserting “sponsored” items into our news feeds. After all, one would think knowledge about RSS subscriptions is an advertiser’s dream: they know what we subscribe to, which is another way of saying they know what we take an active interest in spending our time reading about because we are interested in it.

I fully expect a clone to emerge anytime soon and I expect to migrate my 242 subscriptions (that’s two hundred and forty two!) with me. Heck, now that others will be able to compete in this area, we may even get improved RSS services!

Tech

Sharing links from Google Reader

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Those who know me are aware that I am addicted to the anything-reading efficiency of Google Reader (204 feed subscriptions and counting). It’s great. If you are one of those people who still open a few websites every morning in order to read news, then you really need to look into this.

We all hate the recent Google Reader redesign. One of the coolest features it had was the ability of sharing a link, so that anything you “share” shows up in your friend’s Google Reader. In their desperate attempts to fight Facebook, Google cut this feature and replaced it with Google+ integration.

I’ve seen a lot of complains about it online, and even a pretty crazy workaround. Here’s mine:

Use the granddaddy of link sharing services: Web 2.0 pioneer Delicious. You can post things on Delicious directly from the Google Reader interface (you need to enable this in the Google Reader Settings).

Let me know if you create a Delicious account, and I may just add your feed to my Google Reader account. Here’s mine. Or you can just subscribe to The MKX® Super Feed, which aggregates Delicious, Flickr, The MKX®, The MKX® Photo Central, Twitter and YouTube in a single, convenient feed.

My Blog

Subscriptions!

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The MKX® is proud to introduce a novel way to stay updated on what goes on here: email subscriptions!

So now, on top of our popular RSS feed, you can get a daily digest of all the posts in The MKX® conveniently delivered to your cozy little inbox. Even if you still use Hotmail. And trust us, we fight spam to the death and we vow to never spam you. Never.

Use this page to subscribe. A permanent link intuitively titled “Subscribe to The MKX®” can be found in the sidebar.

You are welcome.

My Blog

Apologize for the fake posts

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Faithful RSS and email subscribers may have noticed a bunch of posts that came up and went away last night.

I’ve been testing a new (but not ready for prime time) very cool feature for The MKX® that will automatically insert my del.icio.us links as posts, instead of secluding them to the no-man’s-land that is the sidebar (does anyone notice those links on the side?).

I apologize for the fake entries you may have been notified of. Stay tuned for this to go live very soon. I hope.