I'm a Google Reader convert

Stefano Rivera — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:51:03 GMT

My blog hasn't had much to say recently, but now that I'm feeling pressured by University assignments, I think it's time to get back into one-post-per-day mode :-)

I remember once trying Google Reader, just after it launched, and very quickly deciding that I couldn't stand it, and I'd stick to Liferea.

Recently, however, Liferea has been giving me trouble. It's been incredibly unstable, and I'd often forgot to run a transparent proxy on my laptop when in restrictive environments, so it'd miss lots of posts and generally be un-happy. The instability I fixed by exporting an OPML list, wiping the configuration, and re-loading, but that was a ball-ache to do. While I was bitching about this, Vhata pushed me to try Google Reader again.

I was pleasantly surprised. It works well, and I didn't find it oppressive. That doesn't mean it's perfect, I'd like to see the following things improved:

Duplicate post detection (i.e. planetified & origional posts, liferea does this)
Performance
Favicons (or something similar, to make it more clear where a post comes from)
On that note, maybe configurable colour borders for important feeds?
Automatic refreshing (i.e. "r")
More viewable area
A key press for opening a post in a backgrounded new tab "v" changes your focus to the new tab, which is against the principles of tabbed browsing.

Some cool things it does that lifera doesn't:

Clicking on a folder shows you the all the posts from the feeds in that folder
"river of posts" view, which lets me get through my reading a lot faster
preloading images for posts that I haven't got to yet (this contributes a fair whack to the reading speed, given the slow interwebs in ZA)
Shared items
Access from multiple machines (OX, X-forwarding worked, but this is neater)
Doesn't crash (sorry lifrea...)

I'm converted. Google Reader really is good.

/me gets on with reading feeds...

Stefano Rivera (Posts about google-reader)

I'm a Google Reader convert