My lifestyle has hit a glitch. Google Reader won't be available after July ist.
Talk about wrenching a man's heart out! How savage is that? I ams a feed junkie. Feeds is how the world enters my headspace. So I've had to migrate somewhere else and invest in a new relationship and try to make it work. That's my 652 feeds and I....
We're a big family you see. From all over the place.
But finding a new home for my kin has proven problematical. I'm not alone in this. Millions are on the march--seeking new aggregation to replace G&#$!+ Reader.
My irony is that in searching for a suitable replacement I've 'gone offline' -- so to speak -- and adopted a desktop Feed Aggregator .
While I feel a bit guilty leaving the clouds ---and my activities of daily living have been forcibly altered as a consequence-- I am delighted to be now using NetNewsWire .
All my Christmases have come at once.
NetNewsWire...
- is so much faster than GReader;
- offers so many more formatting and organizing options;
- includes Instapaper bookmarking support;
- is dense, columned and listed like GReader;
- offers some great flagging and clipping options;
- has easy folder arrangements;
- generates a customisable tab protocol
It may take some getting used to as NetNewsWire functions 'almost' as a standalone web browser and you need to play with it in order to tweak it to your everyday preferences.
For me, after fiddling with it and taking it for a few spins, my feed productivity has escalated and I'm spending less time reviewing my subscriptions. Organising them is, compared to GReader, a breeze...
I'm on a Mac so if you are on Windows you may want to try Feedemon -- which is a news aggregator from the same stable.
The one complication with both these platforms is that they can be/are synced with....Goggle Reader. And as we know Google Reader is to be killed off.
So sharing your feeds across computers -- online -- is complicated by the soon moribundity of the means.
Maybe the folk at NetNewsWire will offer us another syncing tool? But here's a tip: always hang onto a copy of your opml file (a downloadable file of all your feeds). You can export the file from your current reader and later import it into most other feed readers.
One of the advantages with NetNewsWire is integration with Instapaper .
I hadn't use this bookmarking tool before but I'm now hooked. It is really quite good and has won a lot of respect -- example.
I hadn't use this bookmarking tool before but I'm now hooked. It is really quite good and has won a lot of respect -- example.
Instapaper is a web service that saves articles for later reading on web browsers.... After registering a free account, the service saves articles that users select with its "Read Later" bookmarklet and presents them in a minimal, readable text layout. The service was founded in 2008 by Marco Arment and has about 2 million users as of late 2011.While there are apps, extensions and soforth you can uses with Instapaper I find that if I sort my bookmarks into folders -- and that's so quick and easy to do -- I can subscribe to my folders in NetNewsWire. That sort of completes the circle.
***
After Google's announcement about the pending demise of GReader I tried a few online aggregators and I didn't like any of them enough to fall in love. too magazine like. Clunky. Slow to load. Not intuitive enough. All dress up and limited function.
But since adopting a desktop aggregator....I'm delighted and have found that I can indeed have a very good life after Google Reader.
