It’s Not Rocket Surgery

One of my primary uses of my Palm Tungsten C was as an RSS reader. It worked pretty well when I was in WiFi coverage, but it was limited in ability overall. I recently tried Google Reader (as mentioned on Scobleizer). I transferred my OPML file from my Palm and started to explore. I usually start my workday by pulling up a set bookmarked websites in tabs in Firefox. I move from tab to tab looking for the latest news. Throughout the day I fire up a different bookmark set to get updated news, or hit the RSS feeds. Since abandoning my Palm PDA, I have been relying more on Google Reader. I like the layout of Reader page. A list of feeds on the left, with the number of unread articles. There several filtering options and you can collapse/expand user defined categories to limit the size of the list. Clicking on a feed brings up the list of articles, which expand as selected. Clicking on the article title will open the article in a new tab (in Firefox). Which is handy for summary only feeds.

Since using Reader I find myself starting the day with it rather than my growing “morning news” bookmark set, and coming back to it for my periodic updates.

What’s not to like? The feed management needs work, particularly when managing categories. It’s clumsy and slow.

Otherwise, it’s priced right and it doesn’t get in my way. I think i’ll keep it.