All your feed are belong to us

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One of the telecoms is running commercials featuring the myriad conversations that might be ruined by the dreaded "dropped call"--you know, like when you start singing "Jimmy cracked corn and I don't care" to Jim, your future father-in-law. Boy, I can't tell you how many engagements that's ruined for me personally.

Anyhow, I was feeling like my calls had all been dropped this weekend. When I recommend RSS readers to folks, I recommend Bloglines almost exclusively. I've been using it for years now, and never had much call to complain. Until this past weekend, where a day or two's worth of feeds weren't picked up. And in the land of NotADayGoesBy, that puts a serious crimp in my inventional processes. I rely upon the ecology of feeds I've developed to supplement my more immediate life, particularly when it comes to topics for blogging.

And so I'm flirting with Google Reader right now. I'm already seeing ways that it may change my reading habits, based on things like download/upload times, refresh intervals, etc. We'll see how it goes. I can manage two different readers for a spell, switching back and forth and using liberally the "mark all read" feature on each.

It's funny, though, how all it takes is a little hiccup in a service to start me down the path of looking at other options. Bloglines has benefitted from its relative invisibility for me over the past couple of years--as long as it worked just fine, I had no reason to think about changing. I don't really use it to its fullest capacity, so if I'm going to be looking at the full capacity of a reader, it doesn't really cost me much to shop around. And in the meantime, I'll be checking individual sites more often than normal, just to see what I've missed in the past few days.

That is all.

3 Comments

I just switched to Google Reader -- primarily because my iPaq is dead, so my primary reading device is now my laptop, which can handle GR's Web 2.0 features. I'm pretty happy with it, particularly the way it automatically makes read items disappear. (You can turn the feature off if you like.) Adding new feeds is really, really easy.

I see what you mean, and it was funny to have nothing on bloglines but then have them pick up all those feeds on Monday. But do know the google had smiliar problems all weekend. I'm not sure what was up with that happening all over the internets. Of course, I had a campus that lost electrictiy for twelve hours.

I looked at their blog, and it's actually a good thing I picked GR back up now rather than 2 months ago. It looks like they've added a bunch of good features. I'm going to give it a couple of weeks, and then decide...

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This page contains a single entry by cgbrooke published on November 21, 2006 11:39 PM.

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