justice-turtle:

copperbadge:

So, I’ve been testing alternatives to Google Reader.

NewsBlur is slow, annoying, and only lets you have twelve feeds before it wants to charge you money. 

Feedly is supposedly the best alternative out there, but you have to install it on every browser where you want to use it. Who does that anymore? 

Chrome apparently has a feed-reader app but again, a) you have to install it, b) you’re SOL if you use anything other than Chrome anywhere (I use Chrome at home and Firefox at work, don’t even start on me, NOTHING I USE FOR WORK WORKS WITH CHROME) and c) who wants to use a drop down feed reader? 

I was going to try Waurb, but they don’t apparently have an option to log in without using Facebook, and I don’t actually want my feed reader and my social media forcibly linked.

Taptu apparently can’t find two thirds of my feeds. 

Netvibes has a similar issue, but it only seems to struggle with Tumblr (don’t we all) and it’s marginally easier to re-add feeds once you get it set up. Plus they have an auto-detect if you enter a website URL, for those of us with tiny monkey brains who don’t know what to do with XML.

Netvibes seems to be the closest thing to a Reader clone that doesn’t restrict your reading or move so slowly it’s pointless to use, but you have to backflip around their site for a while before you can actually make use of it. I’m pretty sure at one point I pulled my patented “Do magic to make it work” move.

(Go to “Manage Dashboards”, create a new dashboard, delete the one they created for you and filled with irrelevant feeds, then save changes, return to the regular page, delete all the widgets they put in you NEW dashboard, switch it from widget to list view, and then Add Content to add what you actually want. You can import from a Google Reader export file, but you will need to check each feed individually and re-add the ones it can’t find.)

I’m still having some trouble getting Netvibes to pick up my subscription to the Hawkeye (Comics) tag on AO3, plus it keeps insisting that something which was posted yesterday was posted half an hour ago, but there are always little bugs to iron out and it’s picking up the other AO3 tags. At the moment I’m running it side by side with Google Reader, and we’ll see if it keeps up. 

Reblogging for sophia_sol and anyone else who’s interested in Google Reader substitutes.

Tags:

#PSA #Google Reader #why are you doing this to us Google #(guess I’ll try Netvibes) #(I’ve long since given up on using RSS feeds for Tumblr anyway)