Uncomplicating the complicated, making life easier
RSS readers are immensely useful tools for more than just keeping up with your favorite sites. In the past we have talked about different tools to use your Google reader. Some were about bettering your reading experience with Google Reader.
I know I use Google Reader to catch up on my favorite sites. The hard part is making your experience easier. Usually easier means you will use it more. Here are a few ways to make Google Reader easier to use.
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Like many of you, I use a lot of Google products. It’s hard not to – they’re usually useful and free. To date, nearly everything Google has released has been a game-changer in its field. Earth, Maps, Gmail, Android, and countless other tools have each raised the bar for what we expect out of software, particularly on the web. When Google released Google+ a short while ago, that left many of us “power users” wondering if/when it would be integrated with Google Reader, the fantastic RSS feed reader. There have been a few plugins/extensions/etc released by third parties with the aim to fill this gap until Google makes it official, but so far the best of the bunch seems to be RSS Share for Google+ and Google Reader. It connects the two services so seamlessly that it’s easy to forget that it’s an addon.
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If you are a Google Reader user, you will know that its interface is dull, and kind of…boring. FeedSquares aims to supercharge your Google Reader experience by providing a visually pleasing interface for you to read your RSS feeds.
FeedSquares is a Google Chrome extension that shows your Google Reader feeds in a beautiful feed wall. Each square on the wall represents a single feed and the first image from each feed is used as the background for each square. The result is a visually stunning photo wall.
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How many of you are pissed off by a partial RSS feed? I am not sure about you, but i sure do.
In case you are still not aware, most, if not all, the blogs in the whole Internet provide a RSS feed that you can subscribe in a feed reader. Some of these blogs provide a partial feed that shows only the headline and a small excerpt. To read the full content, you will have to visit the actual site. From the reader’s point of view, this is a bad user experience and does not aid in productivity.
So, what solutions do we have?
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I have been an avid user of Google’s RSS reader for quite some time. Since I bought my smartphone, I was able to view my RSS feeds on the phone’s browser through Google Reader. Owning an Android phone means that I have become accustomed to using Google branded applications for most of the things I do on the phone. For example, I use Gmail for email, Maps for directions and GPS, Calendar for my schedule, YouTube for videos, etc. However, considering that I spend a lot of time on Google Reader, I was disappointed that Google had neglected to make a dedicated application for this service. It was easily accessible from a mobile website, however the website could be a little cumbersome to use. Even the third-party applications to view Google Reader were quite poor.
So, I was pleasantly surprised when Google finally launched a dedicated Google Reader application for the Android platform. At this point the application is essentially a front-end for the mobile website, however it is fast, light and simple to use.
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Using the Android browser to surf the web is usually quite painfree. Whenever you encounter a site that is not optimized for mobile, you simply do a pinch action to zoom into the site. However, if you load the Google Reader site on your Android browser, you will definitely be frustrated over the small font and the inability to zoom into the site. No matter how hard you pinch, the small font just won’t become bigger.
If you are looking for ways to increase the font size of Google Reader site (or any other sites that don’t allow scaling) so as to increase the readability, here is a simple hack using bookmarket.
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There was a time when I wouldn’t even think of moving all the RSS feeds that I read to the cloud and I swore by desktop-based applications like FeedDemon. This was before I discovered Google Reader. Nowadays, I use Google Reader to keep up with all my RSS feeds and while I’m not entirely in love with it, I know my online life won’t be complete without it.
I love the always available convenience of Google Reader and the fact that I can take all my feeds with me wherever I go but I’ll have to admit that I’m not really a big fan of the user interface and I’m sure if the Google engineers sit together for a night or so, they can probably even come up with a better interface.
Till that happens, however, I’ve decided to use this wonderful add-on for Chrome, my browser of choice, that super-charges Google Reader into something incredible.
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RSS feeds let you read blog updates and news items from all over the web in a news reader. The most popular web based news reader is Google Reader and we have earlier discussed some Google Chrome extensions to maximize your RSS experience. But in some situations, reading feeds inside a browser may not be possible or comfortable. Especially when you use Microsoft Outlook all the time to read and reply emails, plan meetings etc. You do not want another feed reader software or your browser to read news updates. Moreover, you may be working in your office and can’t risk your job by opening Google reader in a browser.
All you want is a simple solution which will let you read your emails and RSS feeds at a central place. Microsoft Outlook 2007 has a solution for this.
The Google Chrome browser is making some great strides to take over the browser game. One of the areas where it lacks right out of the proverbial “box” is its inability to handle RSS. Until recently when Chrome users on Windows machines were given the ability to add extensions, you would have to (gulp) copy and paste the feed into your reader. Pretty archaic I know.
In the short time extensions have been available for the Chrome browser, quite a few add-ons have popped up to alleviate the RSS deficiencies. Below are 13 different extensions to ease your RSS withdrawal. Granted many of these do the same basic function, each can add something unique. By no means do you need every extension on the list, but its nice to have more than one option to try.
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The Internet is quickly becoming many people’s one-stop shop for getting information. There are tons of newspapers, magazines, podcasts, blogs, etc. talking about something that will be of interest to a group of people.These publications usually offer RSS feeds that make it easy for their readers to continue viewing their content outside of their site. If you have more than ten RSS feeds that you read every day, you probably use (or need) a RSS Reader to manage them. These RSS Readers can be web-only or downloadable software.
Below are the top three web RSS Readers that you can use to manage your RSS feeds: [Read more...]
