Be Excellent To Each Other

Just seen that Google are dropping the Google Reader service in July.

That's a bit annoying, so now I need to find a good RSS feed aggregator that will work with my favourite news reading apps.

Very annoying indeed! Why would they get rid of it, it can't be that much of a drain?

Anybody have any suggestions? Preferably an online aggregator I can import google reader xml into

Seems that everything they discontinue there is a replacement on google plus to migrate people there instead. I can imagine the google homepage switching there soon.

Link from official blog for further reading.
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/0 ... aning.html

Looks like you can export your feeds using Google Takeout.... but where to?

I quite like the personalised homepage that they're also getting rid of. They say I should use "apps" or something instead. Fuck you, Google.

It will certainly mean I visit Google a lot less, and I may use it as the push to move away from them for e-mail as well.

Buggers.

It being web based and linked to the email login is very convenient.

Replacements I am considering: http://feedly.com, http://www.feedafever.com/, NewsBlur (site is down right now so cannot link).

Oh, very much so. Although, to be fair, I don't read as many blogs as I used to and generally just click 'mark all unread' these days. Still, might be a chance to clear the deadwood or nutters from the list.

Sons of bitches! Between this and, as markg mentioned, them getting rid of the incredibly useful iGoogle homepage it seems that me and Google aren't on the same page about what constitutes a useful product.

I suspect we did this elsewhere and it's technically off-topic, but is there any decent replacements out there for the iGoogle homepage? It's usefulness to me stems from being able to put calendar, tasks and RSS widgets (all using Google of course) on there so I can see everything that needs doing at a glance when I load up my browser.

I was irked when they removed the feature in Reader that could tell you when a non-RSS page had changed. Very handy for keeping an eye on changing club timetables and stuff.

I never even knew about that but you're right, that does sound very handy. NOW I'M EVEN MORE ANNOYED!

I guess I am finally going to have to learn Twitter. Anyone has any experience with using Twitter as a news reader? How do you handle things like saving a page for later reading?

I don't use Twitter as a reader but you can "favourite" tweets to read them later. Not sure if that's the same, but it's what I do at work when I want to read stuff at home.

Do people still use Instapaper to save things for reading later?

I already use feedly, and it is pretty great.

I use Pocket (which has recently renamed itself to 'read something' , I can click on stuff on the phone to move it there and there is a browser plug in so you get a pull down menu with them similar to your bookmarks

http://getpocket.com/

Hmm.. i'm not sure those sort of aggregation and prioritising sites work for me though, I primarily use RSS for webcomics and to let me know when any good films are release for download.

I basically want a simple page that shows all my feeds and which ones have new content. Much like Google Reader in fact

But as I understand it, that relies on Google Reader for cloud sync, which for me is the point of using Google Reader.

I suppose the only point of syncing is to hide items you have already seen. So Twitter probably doesn't solve that either.

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/14/google-reader/

It seems like Feedly is the best bet, and from what I can see I can set it up to work in a way that will suit me

I don't understand how Twitter could ever be used as a replacement for an RSS reader?

Although, not too unsurprisingly, I'm getting a 503 error when trying to sync Feedly to reader.
I suspect they are getting hit pretty hard at the moment!

Nevertheless, a lot of people are suggesting that RSS is dying and Twitter is what the cool kids use.

These are such bad news that Google reader should be included in the Celebrity Deathlist.

I use this tool daily, perhaps too much and sometime when i shouldn't, but i still hope for a change of heart from google.

This 'lot' of people might need to do a bit better than just suggest it and instead explain how it's actually functionally comparable.

On a feedly tip, I've just installed and it's...okay. The UI is very swishy but the difference between 'stuff you've seen and stuff you haven't' isn't as clear cut as I'd like; and there's no bloody 'mark all as read' option which is either a criminal oversight or a sign that the designers don't think I should be using it the way I'm trying to use it.

Also, I'd prefer something which also allowed me to login to a website and view my current unread article list from there as well as from my phone. Is Google Reader really unique in that respect? It's the only RSS manager I've ever used and I'd just assumed there were loads of functional alternative.

The tick on the top right marks a whole category as read if you have the category selected instead of an individual post.

I rarely use Google reader anymore as I switched to Pulse on my iPhone.

I don't get a tick anywhere on screen in the Android app; although I have just stumbled across the fact doing a long swipe to the left will mark an entire 'page' full of stuff as read. Also you can get a list of current new unread stuff from the Today category which might give me what I want. Although I'm wondering if it really does mean 'today' i.e. if I had unread articles from yesterday or the day before would that view show them or would I need to go hunting for them, which wouldn't be very useful.

Ah, i'm using the webpage, which seems to be pretty much the same as google reader, once you turn on "tiles" view.

The feedly webpage is slow as poop.

I'm quite unhappy that google reader is going

I'm hoping that is due to massive overloading at the moment, but yes it is glacial.

It's actually quite nice. Nice Android app, too. Things are going to be OK!

There's also an "Auto Mark as Read" in Advanced Settings.

Feedly asked me to install their firefox add on, so I did. It added an annoying icon to the bottom right of every webpage and everytime I opened an imagine in a separate tab it put the icon right in the middle of the image. Really, really annoying :/ I've removed the extension.

As far as I can tell I can't 'use' the feedly website without this shitty extension? GAH.



I just want a cloud-sync'd app or a website that aggregates RSS feeds

There is an option in preferences on your feedly page (link to prefs is bottom of left hand column I think) to turn off the icon, i think.

Feedly is working for me, the main issue I have with it is that every time I go back to it, it moves stuff around based on how new it is. I don't want that, I want everything to be where I left it, i'll choose what is important for me to look at! I'm sure i'll get used to it...

Hopefully either Google Reader will be saved, or someone will build a proper clone and I can go back.

Just click the button and a link to prefs appears right there.

Aye, looks that way. Which is fucking stupid, all it's doing is pulling back your current feed data and displaying it on a website; why do they they need a bloody browser extension for that?

I've tried using their mobile app in place of Google Reader for the sake of getting used to it but it's not easy. It seems to only want to display unread articles by feed so you get multiple small lists rather than just 'here's all your current unread articles' which is what I really want. It also doesn't seems to be entirely up to date as there are sometimes unread articles on the Google side that don't show up on feedly but maybe that's just a function of how often they're syncing your feedly data with Google Data in the background.

I dunno; I'll use feedly if I absolutely have to and probably get used to it but it's just not clear what it's doing all the time and it feels like it's needlessly obfuscating the background feed data in service of having a swishy and odd interface which is annoying.

The Digg guys are apparently now accelerating an existing project to replace Google Reader.

Yay!

"Digg's reader will maintain what it calls the best of Google Reader's features, including its API, while incorporating changes that reflect the relevance of social networks and other popular Internet communities."

Awww, fuck, it'll be all swishy and filtered and prioritised and shit, won't it?

Hopefully all that shit will be optional so if you just want RSS data that's what you get; with an ability to integrate other data sources only if you want. Hopefully.

Gave up on Feedly for two reasons. The mini icon in the bottom of your browser? The preferences only work if you are logged in to your google account, and it is set by default to be always displayed. Which is really fucking annoying if you sync your chrome extensions across machines, but use different accounts on each machine, such as if you had a work and home gmail account, for example. It is literally impossible to remove the mini icon if you have the extension enabled but aren't signed into the account which you use for feedly. How stupid a design decision is that?
Add to that it now has been setup to keep chrome alive and running the background when you shut chrome down, and that isn't an option you can set yourself via preferences, it's always on.

Bye Feedly, you were a reasonable service, but you have no idea how to treat your users.


I've moved over to http://theoldreader.com/ which seems pretty good so far, in as much as it is almost a direct copy of Google Reader at the moment, which is exactly what I want.

I've still got Feedly installed on my phone as the Android app has been improved recently to make it actually fucking usable (as opposed to very pretty and swishy but no actual cocking use) but the fact that you needed a browser extension installed just to use the website on a PC was never an idea that worked for me and, as you say, with The Old Reader being pretty much exactly what is needed I'll very likely move over to that when Google Reader finally dies. You don't even need an app as their website works perfectly well in the mobile version of Chrome. They've already imported my feeds so I'm pretty much good to go and might start weaning myself off Google Reader in preparation for the switch off.

I never used Reader - what did it do?

Could I make you another one?

It's an rss reader essentially. Takes all feeds and gives you a nice Web based ui with persistent history as to what's been read and what hasn't.

And yes please

Basically server-side RSS aggregation (um, I may be misusing some or all of those terms). You added your list of RSS feed URLs to the site under your Google account and every time you hit the site or refreshed the app it would show you all the articles in your subscribed feeds that you hadn't marked as read. Any updates you made (add new feed, remove a feed, mark individual articles as read/unread) would then be persisted whether you hit the site from any web browser or app using your account.



I don't imagine the basics of it would be all that difficult for someone with your experience and a few weeks ago it would be something well worth looking into as people were struggling to find decent alternatives but personally I'm now pretty happy with The Old Reader as a direct replacement so I don't know if it would be worth your effort or not (speaking only for myself here of course).

That seems rather simple - but if there's a good replacement I'll let them do it

I've moved over to ProtoPage after being an iGoogle user for the last few years. iGoogle is being retired in November, so I knew I had to jump across sometime. They've got an inbuilt RSS doohicky, but it doesn't auto-refresh and it groups posts from the source, which is a bit of a bugger. gReader was great in giving you a big lump of a list with things interwoven by date, and also just straight text with no formatting etc which meant it sat nicely in an iGoogle window. I've tried Feedly, but there's so much formatting to the page it doesn't sit well in a window which is an shame.

I tried a few suggested iGoogle alternative the other day, including Protopage, but never really found one that suited me; I'll need to have another fiddle with Protopage though as I really need something to replace iGoogle. I think part of the problem is I'm such a heavy user of Google specific services which don't necessarily play as well with other people. The widgets I've got on my iGoogle page that I'd really like on any replacement are:

• Feed of upcoming Google calendar events
• Outstanding Google Tasks list
• Mixed list of unread RSS articles from across all my subscribed feeds

The Old Reader is exactly what I was looking for. Ideal. Ta.

Like writing an email client, it's a job that appears simple enough but is actually insanely complicated. I wouldn't bother if I were you.