Benjamin Watt

Google reader

October 2, 2006 – 4:11 pm | by Benjamin Watt

For quite some time now, I’ve been keeping track of the many websites I visit via Mozilla Firefox‘s ‘Live Bookmarks’ feature. This was fine for awhile, but as I’ve added more and more sites, and as I had no way to know what I’d read already other than relying on my memory, I’ve been considering trying out some of the seperate RSS reader applications.

The final straw was returning from London to find that in three days, just about everywhere I visit had gone ‘post crazy’ – it took far too long to catch up.

As luck would have it though, Google went and launched a new version of their Google Reader site, which on closer look seemed as though it would suit me just fine – if I give it all my sites it will list off any updates for me to look at and keep track of what I’ve read.

Moving all my live bookmarks was relatively easy once I’d worked out there’s an extension for Firefox to allow you to export them in OPML format, ready for importing into Google Reader. After some initial mopping up, rearranging some of them into different folders, and marking recent posts at each site as already read, I was good to go…

Sort of. While Google Reader has certainly sped up my internet browsing, and I do quite like it – it’s still a little buggy (remember it’s still a Google Labs product) as the above screen shows. I’ve added 115 subscriptions, and it can be a little slow at times. There are also sometimes phantom entries telling me a feed has a new post when there aren’t any, but it’s simple and useful enough that I’ll stick with it for now.