Bloglines continues to impress me. Combining their Ajaxy update system with the keyboard navigation (the functions of s, j and k are imprinted in my brain at this stage!) and I find little reason to change.

I told you at the Mesh Meetup that I was looking for a better RSS reader solution than my current offline Thunderbird usage. I started trying Google Reader before I read this post. Here’s my short analysis – I love it!

Here’s a longer synopsis:
- like you, I definitely dig the action to mark as read while scrolling, it has helped sped up my reading (Thunderbird was not rendering pages faster than GR)

- I did a thorough cleaning of my RSS collection but am still left with a little over 160 feeds, though nowhere near your exhaustive list

- those who are importing their OPML files, even though you are used to “folders”, the best way is to treat these folders like tags, I painstakingly re-tagged all my feeds with “tags” about what I want to get out of them, for example a Canadian food blog may be tagged with “canada” and “food”, so later on I can choose what function I wish to concentrate during reading. Maybe I want to read all Canadian blogs first, then food blogs. GR will mark them read in both categories on my first pass-through

- I find I am less sentimental for keeping track of old articles with GR, which is good. I’ve archived too many useless old articles but asking GR to show only the new articles means I make a conscious effort to “star” articles I want to revisit. I can’t just move onto the next article without possibly losing track of that article in the future, so my decision is truly based on my needs

Wish List
- I wish GR would have some function to notify you of feeds that have not produced new material within a certain threshold. For example, I’d like to be notified of any feeds that have not produced a new article in the last 30 days. This allows me to decide whether or not to unsubscribe. If there’s already such a function. I’d appreciate some pointers.

LUNA web

I find that I’m working a LOT faster using Google Reader. I have my settings set to show titles only, and now it takes me a fraction of the time to find relevant posts. I also like the way the main screen shows recently updated feeds when I first open up GR – I’ve caught interesting posts from feeds that I usually don’t have the time to get to because of this.

Anyway, there’s an option to export all of my feeds as an OPML file.

I then imported this into Google Reader, which also preserves the folders I had the feeds organised with in Flock.

So what do I now have? All of my news feeds available from anywhere at any time…

Re: A-list.

It’s a sad and silly thing,
but in general, your comment about renaming problogger
has a lot of truth to it.

Products, services, and people with names
near the start of the alphabet,
… all other things being equal….
will sell a little better than their “wxyz” counterparts.

I used to own a big retail bookstore in Canada,
and most people scanned the shelves left-to-right
and top-to-bottom.

Jim Van Wyck
PS…. tall people get higher wages too.

I’d like to see them develop an AJAX type drag and drop feature along the lines of Netvibes to be able to quickly rearrange my feeds.

Agree that GR is slow loading, but the other features make it worth switching.

Although I do agree with the comment about speed, it does get a little slow at times. But it’s the little nuances like all the cool AJAXy stuff that make it useful, especially as you can instantly tag items by just pressing ‘gt’