google reader

like those lifehacker bastards who beat me to the point, i’ve also been trying out google reader as an alternative rss feed reader to my usual bloglines. i’ve tried other blog readers in the past, but my beef with most of them is that they try to force you into this whole “stream of consciousness” type reading where all of the posts are no longer divided into categories, but appear just as one incoherent stream based on time.

can someone explain to me how this is a good thing? suddenly instead of being nice and organized, i’ve got the blog equivalent of reese’s peanut butter cups: they’ve got chocolate in my peanut blogger. or specifically, they’ve got fantasy football updates in my project runway gossip in my cellphone news in my apple rumors in my roland piquepaille’s technology trends in my nba news in my treehuggery in my gadget news in my confessions of an insecure salesman in my gofuggery in my squid news in my boingboing!

so at least google reader passes that test and allows me to read by individual feed as well as (self-defined) category.

things i don’t like about it:

• updated feed list doesn’t always refresh without you doing something or refreshing the page. sometimes, but not always.
  
• it doesn’t show you updated posts. for example, boingboing often updates their posts with new content, or when you have feeds that update with new comments.
  
• no favicon support (which is also the obscure cheryl’s ass-answer to my twiddly bit change a while ago).
  
• the mobile version doesn’t let you read by blog or category, and reverts you to stream-of-blog
  type reading. which would be a dealbreaker except for below…

things i do like about it:

• reading as you actually read it - instead of just marking all of the items as read when you click on that blog or category, it only marks them as read as you scroll through them, so if you don’t get to all of them, they’re still unread. it took me a while to get used to this, but it’s incredibly helpful.
  
• starring - likewise, you can star posts to look at later. so if there’s something i want to keep, i can do that instead of having to keep it unread over and over.
  
• pictures show up more often. i don’t know why, but they do.
  
• while i complained about the inability to sort the blogs in the mobile version, the one really good thing is that if you need to click through to view the original post on the blog website, it does this through the google page viewer, which is fantastic. this reformats it for reading on a mobile device, so it extracts the post and relevant parts instead of you trying to read an unfriendly web page on your smartphone or whatever. this is what happens with mobile gmail as well and it kicks ass.

all things considered, i’m actually pretty happy with it. consider me switched over, at least for now.