Well, I've been dissatisfied with the instability of Bloglines for a while now, so the switch to Google Reader seemed like the perfect thing for me. I'm glad this lesson came along to give me the nudge to quit procrastinating.
Likes:
Items are not marked as read until you actually scroll down to view them. This is especially wonderful when my browser hangs up and I have to relaunch. With Bloglines, every time that happened, any items which had loaded, but which I had not yet actually looked at, were lost forever. With Google Reader, they're still there waiting for me. This alone guarantees that I will stick with Google Reader and leave Bloglines behind.
I love the hotkeys, especially j and k. It's nice to have an alternative to scrolling.
I like the presence of links to open articles in a new tab. (Just after the title--look for the two arrows in a little circle, resembling a fast forward button.) That saves me the trouble of right-clicking and selecting "open in new tab" every time I want to look at the comments for a post.
Dislikes:
Google Reader loads very slowly, even on DSL. It's not as bad as Google Maps, which is almost unusable on my home connection, but it's still a little troublesome at times.
In Bloglines, I could order the feeds within a folder, and I could get all new items from site A, then all new items from site B, etc. So I could have a gradual and carefully planned transition from serious to silly, or vice versa. In Google Reader, it's always newest item first, so clicking on one of my folders gives me a mess like D, B, A, C, C, A, A, B, D, A. That drives me nuts. I'm going to have to create a lot of new folders and reorganize everything so that blogs of dissimilar tone don't get all mixed together.
Overall, though, the pros outweigh the cons. A good feed reader has become an absolutely indispensable tool in my day-to-day life, both at work and at home, and there's a lot to like with Google Reader.
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2 comments:
I started out using Bloglines, and Allana kept promoting Google Reader. I resisted for awhile, but now I'm hooked. The fact that I can no longer open Bloglines at work using IE was the final straw.
Hi Anj, I wanted to let you know that you can order the feeds and change the sort order so either all of the newest or oldest are on top.
To change the order of your feeds go to the Subscriptions area on the left side of the screen. Just to the right of the word Subscriptions you should see a down arrow. Click on the arrow to open the dropdown menu. On this menu are the options to Sort alphabetically or Sort by drag and drop. Obviously if you select drag and drop you can then rearrange your feeds in any order you’d like.
Another option you have is to select if you want to see the oldest or newest items first. This option is towards the top of the screen under the bar where the blog name appears. The wording of the button varies depending on what you currently viewing. If you are viewing folder the button will be labeled Folder Settings. If you are viewing an individual feed the button will be labeled Feed Settings. For the feeds you have the option to sort by oldest or by newest. For the folder view you also have the oldest and newest option but there is a third option called auto-sort. The auto-sort option is suppose to help prevent blogs that only have one or two posts a month not get “lost” amongst other high volume blogs.
Let me know if you have any questions.
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