Tag Archives: rss

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!

My Blog

Twitter sidebar

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I still don’t fully “get” Twitter, and I’m not much of a user. But some people do. People who are toppling governments and stuff. Still, I decided to add a little bit of Twitter magic to The MKX® in the form of a widget sidebar (look to the right, below the Google Reader shared items). Another possible idea: Automatically publish new posts on Twitter. Or include my posts in the RSS feed. The possibilites are endless. Follow me: @marcoskirsch

One added bonus: Mention me on Twitter, and you get automatically posted on the widget to the right. So feel free to extol my virtues in 140 characters or less – if you can.

My Blog

The MKX®: Now better tasting

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deliciousblogadd-ons02

Ever heard of delicious, formerly and more cleverly known as del.icio.us? Yes you have.

Since March of 2005, a list of links I add to my delicious account show up in the sidebar of my blog. As you may have noticed a couple of days ago, I’ve improved upon this and modified the blog’s RSS feed so that those links show up there as well. Hooray!

So if you currently subscribe to both The MKX®‘s feed AND to my delicious feed, you can remove the delicious one. If you don’t subscribe to neither, you don’t know what you’re missing. Go read this now.

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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.