A recent school assignment was to create a Bloglines account and start adding RSS feeds to it. I have been a blog reader for a very long time and currently have over 150 feeds in various categories set up in my reader of choice. So what reader might that be?
First, there are many debates out there about which reader is the "best" and "most user-friendly." One such posting can be found HERE.I must admit that I started off with an account at Bloglines, and I agree with the above post when Gina states:
I'm not exactly an easily-offended aesthete, but Bloglines' design mademe wince from the get-go. It's just plain ugly. The color, the font, the boxiness of it all - and after awhile a design youdon't like starts to drag on you, becomes work to look at and use.
In addition to the aesthetics, in my case, my work library got on a kick with filtering nearly EVERYTHING that had anything to do with social networking. Because blogs have a social aspect to them through the comment feature, bloglines was blocked. I could no longer get my feeds and read my daily library blogs.I was on a search for a new reader!
Enter Google Reader. Luckily, the title is pretty general and therefore wasn't blocked, but I knew it would be a pain to try and get all my feeds switched over. In my mind I thought I would have to import them one by one which I just didn't have the time to do.In my searching, I was happy to find a nifty tool that would allow me to export my entire "library" of feeds as an OPML file which I could in turn import into Google Reader. Fast and painless!
Overall, I don't have a love/hate relationship with either of the feed readers, but for my situation, Google Reader has done its job nicely. I am moving more and more in the direction of Google's many free tools and have been very happy with everything I have tried (Blogger, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Notebook, etc). The other cool thing about many of the Google tools is that there are usually Firefox extensions that will allow you to work with those tools right in your browser!
So which RSS feed reader is for you? Leave me a comment with your thoughts!
First, there are many debates out there about which reader is the "best" and "most user-friendly." One such posting can be found HERE.I must admit that I started off with an account at Bloglines, and I agree with the above post when Gina states:
I'm not exactly an easily-offended aesthete, but Bloglines' design mademe wince from the get-go. It's just plain ugly. The color, the font, the boxiness of it all - and after awhile a design youdon't like starts to drag on you, becomes work to look at and use.
In addition to the aesthetics, in my case, my work library got on a kick with filtering nearly EVERYTHING that had anything to do with social networking. Because blogs have a social aspect to them through the comment feature, bloglines was blocked. I could no longer get my feeds and read my daily library blogs.I was on a search for a new reader!
Enter Google Reader. Luckily, the title is pretty general and therefore wasn't blocked, but I knew it would be a pain to try and get all my feeds switched over. In my mind I thought I would have to import them one by one which I just didn't have the time to do.In my searching, I was happy to find a nifty tool that would allow me to export my entire "library" of feeds as an OPML file which I could in turn import into Google Reader. Fast and painless!
Overall, I don't have a love/hate relationship with either of the feed readers, but for my situation, Google Reader has done its job nicely. I am moving more and more in the direction of Google's many free tools and have been very happy with everything I have tried (Blogger, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google Notebook, etc). The other cool thing about many of the Google tools is that there are usually Firefox extensions that will allow you to work with those tools right in your browser!
So which RSS feed reader is for you? Leave me a comment with your thoughts!
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