So, @CleoPompom asked:
“What is a good way to pull in feeds from the blogs I follow? Heard of GoogleReader, but are there others?”
Keeping up to date with a large number of blogs and news sites can become tiresome, particularly if you’re trying to do it from multiple computers or devices. I’ve taken a number of different approaches over the years and thought I’d share my current method, as I’m finding it’s working pretty well. (This isn’t really a review of the applications I use, just a note on what I find useful.)
At home I use a Macintosh, multiple Macs in fact. At work, however, I’m on a Windows XP machine all day. In addition to that, my iPhone barely leaves my side. The challenge is being able to access all of the same RSS feeds from each computer or my phone without having to go through a setup procedure on each device every time I want to add a new feed. In addition, the read status of each item in my feeds should be synchronised between devices so that I’ll know what I have and haven’t read regardless of which device I’m using or on which device I did the reading.
This is pretty much taken care of by Google Reader, a web application that manages your RSS subscriptions in the cloud rather than on your computer. It allows you to log in and view all of your feeds from any device with a web browser. So far so good, but when I started using it I was quickly switched off by the interface. I found it cumbersome and it lacked the ease of use and easy keyboard navigation I was used to with applications such as Vienna. Fortunately, Google have provided an API which allows software developers to hook into Google Reader and build client applications for it. Vienna, for all of its brilliance and ease of use as a stand alone RSS reader, is not a Google Reader client, so I had to search for an alternative.
For the Mac I found a nice little application called Gruml. It behaves in many ways like Vienna, with easy navigation using the arrow keys and opening of links in tabs being two of the things I find most appealing. It’s also really easy to add a new feed, which of course gets sync’ed back to the cloud and onto other Google Reader clients. Gruml is still in beta but is a pleasure to use and I’ve not yet discovered any issues with it. It’s also free, which is a nice bonus. Whether it will remain free once out of beta, I’ve no idea, but I can recommend it in its current state to all OS X users looking for a Google Reader client.
On my Windows machine at work I’m using FeedDemon, which is also a free download. Although not quite as polished as Gruml (let’s face it, how many Windows applications are as polished as their Mac equivalents) it does everything I need it to and it’s a pleasure to use.
But often I find myself catching up on my feeds not on a computer but on my phone: when I’m lying in bed, sitting on the sofa, walking, standing in a queue, pretty much anywhere. There are loads of RSS apps for the iPhone, but I use Reeder, a £1.79 Google Reader client that’s minimalist and easy to use. It has a simple, uncluttered interface and displays feed titles and texts clearly and without any distraction. Links open in a web view inside the app and you can share items or save for later reading via a number of web services including Twitter, FaceBook and Instapaper (another app I love). It’s not possible to add new feeds to Google Reader within Reeder as far as I know, but that tends to be something I’d do from a computer anyway so it doesn’t feel like too much of a missing feature.
So that’s my setup basically. Gruml on the Mac, FeedDemon on Windows and Reeder on my iPhone. I can always log into Google Reader from a web browser, on the rare occasion that none of the other methods are available, but that’s not often. So despite Google Reader being a clunky web app to navigate, in my opinion, it’s an invaluable service for keeping track of my favourite blogs and I’ve found pleasant clients for it to use on my computers and phone.
Do you have any other methods for managing your RSS feeds on multiple devices? Let me know in the comments!
