Friday, July 12, 2013

RIP Google Reader - What Now?



Well, you may remember that many moons ago I wrote a post about how Google Reader could save you a lot of time by letting you know when people create new posts on blogs you love to follow.  That promise is still true and I still use it for my friend Eli's blog!  I have a Google Reader iGoogle gadget and when Eli puts up a new post, I get notified right away, it's great!

Well, sad news.  Both Google Reader AND iGoogle are dying and will soon be dead : (

So what now?

Well, there are a lot of products out there now like readability.com, feedbin.me, feedly.com, feedwrangler.net, feedafever.com, etc...  There are also some apps like Reeder which have come out for you smartphone users.  However, I use none of them.  I'm just depressed about the state of the whole thing and couldn't be bothered to do much about it.  I expect you are in a similar position if you are reading this.

Here are my suggestions if you need a quickfix:

1 - See if the website you follow has an email update.  That way you can get notified by email when a new post is created.

2 - If you use twitter, see if that website generates a tweet each time they make a new post, then just follow them on twitter.

3 - If you sit at a desk all day and use outlook, just put the RSS feed address into outlook.  You will then get a notification when there are new blog posts right in Outlook.  Here is a very quick video showing how you can set it up!


If you any of you have a suggestion for a good replacement for Google Reader that won't cause me a lot of pain, I would love to hear about it.  Leave me a comment.  Peace out!

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