Google Reader

About a month or so back, I shifted over from my beloved Blogmatrix Jaeger RSS reader to Google Reader. At the time, I was bugged by some unreliability in Jaeger (e.g., if the system was shut down while Jaeger was updating a feed, it might lose even the entry for that feed), and I’ve been on sort of a Google kick of late.

Good decision on my part.

Jaeger is still, IMO, a fine product (albeit shamefully abandoned, woefully under-supported, and now nearly vanished from Blogmatrix’s site). It’s second biggest strength, to me, was not integrating a crappy browser into an RSS reader, meaning things would load directly into Firefox (and meaning its footprint was light). More important than that, it was brutally powerful in detecting updates — looking for RSS feeds on the site, looking for other aggregation sites that might have feeds, and, if all
else failed, allowing you to detect link and content changes on a page so that you could effectively keep up to date on non-RSSed sites. It also had a nice export tool to help me create my blog’s blogroll. I’d used it effectively for four or five years.

But Google Reader — is really nice.

1. The page organization is solid.
2. The ability to see reads I’ve already read is nice.
3. The in-reader browser is … okay, I’ve learned to like the convenience (and security) of that.
4. It’s okay at finding feeds — not as good as Jaeger, but I only found two or three sites on my blogroll that it didn’t work on (way down from the last time I tried another reader).
5. I like it that Google is visiting each site, not my browser — that hurts their being able to see me as a statistic, but it also keeps the company security folks happy.
6. And, of course, it’s available from any net-connected computer, not just from my own PC.

It’s just a nice, useful tool. Highly recommended as a way of keeping up on the sites you visit.