Comments on: RSS Reader

By: randomwalker

randomwalker — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 21:18:46 +0000

This is like what, the 15th vote for google reader. You’re not seeing a biased sample, if you check your server logs you’ll see ‘most everyone uses google reader to access your feeds.

By: Arun K Viswanathan

Arun K Viswanathan — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:22:03 +0000

Yes, it’s search of content in the feeds over time. So it’s not just what the feed contains this week. A year later, when you want to go back to the articles on the salamander lemma across all the blogs you track, you’ll appreciate search more than hunting through bookmarks. Give it a shot!

By: Walt

Walt — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 03:34:35 +0000

We could all go by John, if it would make you feel better.

By: john stephen lewis

john stephen lewis — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:49:28 +0000

John,

I suspect she meant searching for an article that has already been read.

-John

p.s. Our names suck.

By: John Armstrong

John Armstrong — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 16:09:40 +0000

Why would I want to search my RSS feeds? They present news. News comes up, I read it, and I’m done. And what I read is stuff I haven’t heard about already. I would never have heard of the salamander lemma unless it had come up in an RSS feed, and I wouldn’t have known to search for it.

By: Arun K Viswanathan

Arun K Viswanathan — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:19:46 +0000

@John Armstrong:

Firefox’s equivalent in-built RSS support is called “Live Bookmarks” and it’s a bookmark for the RSS feed that opens out like a folder with individual “bookmarks” for each item in the RSS feed. So it probably does more than the description for Safari’s support.

However Google Reader is far superior because it’s easy to tag (individual items and whole feeds), share (via a meta RSS feed), email (inline with access to your GMail contacts), and of course - search! Once you start searching through your RSS feeds, there’s no going back to “bookmarks”.

By: John Armstrong

John Armstrong — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 17:06:19 +0000

What with all the Google love going around, I’ll try to explain my comment from back at the top: Safari has a feed reader built in, and the method for keeping track of your feeds is called a bookmark. Every time Ars Mathematica updates with a post or a comment, a counter next to my math/physics weblog entry on my bookmark bar increments. Nothing is needed but the browser I’m already using.

By: Arun K Viswanathan

Arun K Viswanathan — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:49:21 +0000

Another resounding vote for Google reader. Check out the various feature benefits at http://lifehacker.com/software/google-reader/

By: Walt

Walt — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 05:15:53 +0000

I’m a little creeped out about how central Google has become to my using the web, so I’m loath to become even more dependent. (I usually navigate to this site by typing ars mathematica in Google, rather than typing in the URL or using my bookmark.) I would prefer a Firefox plug-in, anyway. I’ll take a look at LiveClick and FeedReader.

By: Harald Hanche-Olsen

Harald Hanche-Olsen — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:27:47 +0000

A good one, if you’re interested in a standalone reader on the Mac, is Vienna. It integrates well with Firefox, in the sense that you can ask Firefox to use Vienna for subscribing to new feeds. (The same should go for any standalone RSS reader.)
http://www.opencommunity.co.uk/vienna2.php