I’ve actually been using Google Reader for something over a year now. I discovered that I was constantly visiting the same sites over and over, checking to see if anything new had been posted. I finally broke down and started looking into the different aggregators that are available. I settled on Google Reader largely because I already had a Google account, so it was very simple to get started using it–all I had to do was start plugging in the URLs of the sites I wanted to follow. What I found incredibly useful about it was the fact that I could follow more than just blogs; I could add any number of different feeds from places like CNN or The Onion. There are several great webcomics that I follow, such as xkcd and SHAMELESS LIBRARY PLUG.
I discovered fairly quickly that there were all kinds of different options to explore. One important option is the order in which your unread items are displayed. I found that I prefer serials (such as webcomics) to be displayed from oldest to newest, while I often want to read the latest news items first, which often lets me skip older posts that have since been updated. Another is the ability to group items into folders. I haven’t actually made as much use of this; instead, I found that I was reading everything from a site at once, and that I was almost always reading them in the same order, so I simply arranged them in that order so that I could just read through them in order.
One caveat: like anything else, readers can become entirely overwhelming if you follow too many things, or if you let them go for a week. You may very well log in and see this:
This is what the "Mark All As Read" button is for.
Then, you run screaming into the virtual night.
Like this:
Be the first to like this post.
