When I first learned about Google Reader from Loree I was thrilled. No longer would I waste time popping by sites I had bookmarked to see if they had posted anything new. I was never a big fan of the service: in the short time I’ve been using it, it has cut out on me, losing all of my data, at least three times that I can remember. Now it has announced that it will be shutting down in July. I figure “Why wait?”
A site called lifehacker did a lot of the groundwork with a survey of alternatives. The most attractive choice to me was Feedly, but I was not alone. When I tried to access it, I ran out of patience before it managed to fully load. The next best thing, as far as I could tell, was The Old Reader. I signed in via Facebook with no problem. The protocol for adding sites is nearly identical to Google’s…in fact, the reason it was developed was that the original version of GR was much preferred by these developers after Google insisted upon “improving things”. We all know how that goes. Well, I was bombing right along: culling through bookmarks and adding my favorite blogs, when everything froze up on me. I haven’t exactly given up. I’ll give it a rest and try again later. But I am left unable to make any recommendations. How about you? Have you moved on to something that works like a charm?
While we’re at it, I have a couple of other technical glitches that have been bugging me lately. All of a sudden, certain words as I type away get turned into links with no help from me. Anybody know what’s up with that? And the ADS! I never had too much trouble ignoring them before, but now they seem to pop up, filled with wiggly attention-getters, at the top of every page and no way to turn them off. Don’t get me started on the buxom beauties in various stages of undress that appear, unbidden, on my timeline and elsewhere. I’m pretty tolerant, thinking “OK, everybody’s got to try to make a living”, but these things are driving me crazy-nutso! Your thoughts?
I know…seriously annoying, isn’t it! While I used Google Reader quite a bit…I use the sidebar on my blog more often than not. On my iPad, I downloaded a program called “mr. reader” or something like that…which works really well.
I gave Feedly a good shot and my patience has paid off. With Google Reader it was easy to scan the sidebar, see which blogs had new items and dive in to read those. It was pretty easy to ignore certain blogs and let their unread items build over time. With Feedly I need to go through everything, and I like that. There’s no sense of not being able to keep up with my feed list, even though I’m still skipping the majority of items, it’s a more conscious decision to “Mark as Read” items I want to skip.
I migrated to Feedly last night. So far I like it. It took less than 5 minutes. The bulk of my time was spent organizing the blogs. I have a file for “PNW Gardens” “Gardens” “Writerly Friends” “Memoir Helps” “Fun Stuff” and “Publicity.” I like that I can choose a preferred background color (green) and a layout with our without photos. I still have a bit of tweaking I’d like to do but by and large, I am happy with the product. And given that it’s free, I have no room to complain. 🙂
Maybe you can give Feedly anther try Ricki. And for those damn pop up ads everywhere–ANNOYING as all get out. I think Chrome has an ad-blocker option but I don’t have mine enabled.
Good luck.
Scott~Maybe I’ll just start doing this on R’s iPad. He doesn’t use it much.
Ryan~I liked the aesthetics of Feedly, but waited FOREVER for it to lad and finally gave up. I’m sure not wedded to the GR way of doing things. I wonder if you got in on Feedly before they got swamped with new users.
Bria~Thanks for the tip. I’m going to give that one a try.
Grace~Thanks!
Anna B~With 2 votes for bloglovin, I’m on it…tomorrow…after time away from this infernal machine.
Angie~Chrome, here I come. I do love getting all these helpful opinions.
It’s the spam that’s killing me, for every legit comment on my blog I get at least two spammy ones.
Where are you getting all of these pop up ads? I must be lucky (knock on wood), not bad at all here. I still haven’t settled on a new reader but loving all the feedback!
Loree~Akismet does a good job of catching spam before I have to look at it, though a random few still manage to sneak by. It may be linked to WordPress, though (a plug-in). Readers: I’m still experimenting, but bloglovin seems good so far, thanks to Bria & Anna B.
The ads are everywhere, since I switched to Century Link. The worst are the dancing dentures and the swarming cockroaches. They do not appear on Danger Garden, so you must be doing something right.
It’s a pity you don’t have a donate button! I’d without a doubt donate to this fantastic blog! I guess for now i’ll settle for book-marking and adding your RSS feed to
my Google account. I look forward to fresh updates and will
share this site with my Facebook group. Talk soon!