Tag: Google Reader

Slow Feeds Brings A Simple, Unique Innovation To RSS Apps

The first tab, Slow Feeds, lets you switch between All or Unread items for sites with few content every day: for instance, this is where I can find things like the iFixit Blog, Minimal Mac, or Beautiful Pixels. These are sites that I am interested in, but that because of their low-volume nature could sometimes easily get lost in the plethora of unread items (ever wondered why these sites usually don’t publish on Apple keynote day?). The app has been very accurate at picking “slow feeds” for me, going back a few months to older items it knew I might have missed — indeed, thanks to Slow Feeds I rediscovered many articles that I had unintentionally ignored.Federico Viticci

I started using Slow Feeds while researching alternative for Google Reader. I spent most of my reading time in the Slow Feeds tab. I had missed so much great content in the information flood from the over 200 feeds I subscribe to.

Scripting the web with IFTTT

If this then that (IFTTT). It's a service that connects one service to another with actions on specific elements of those services. So, for example, I can tag an image I've just uploaded to Flickr and automatically have a blog post created with that image. Or Add item tagged readability in Feedly or Google Reader to Readability to my Readability reading list.

IFTTT calls a service a channel and connecting services is creating a recipe. There are about 60 channels and quite a few canned recipes you can use right away. However, I chose to create my own to have more control.

Before a recipe can be created each associated channel must first be activated. Activating a channel simply means logging into that service and via IFTTT and giving permissions to access the service. Once a channel is activated it can be used in a recipe. Creating a recipe means selecting a trigger channel and trigger – this – and the destination channel action – that – along with various ingredients. Once your recipe is created you can activate it. I'm bit sure of the timing of recipes. I don't know if they run every hour, half hour etc. Recipes can be edited later and even shared publicly for others to use.

There isn't much more to say. The service is quite easy to use.

Google Reader is gone. Now what?

Goodbye Google Reader by Dave Winer

July 1 isn't that far away, but there's time to get it together. Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on. Those have a better chance of surviving the bubbles.

Sigh! Dave is right.

Many geeks, including myself, are paying the price for our dependence ( addiction? ) to "FREE". Google had decided that Google Reader is a service they no longer want to sink money into. Google is an advertising-driven company, and Google Reader has no ads. It made sense for them to shutter the service.

But now what? What do geeks like me who have become dependent on the service to host our daily firehose of information? The main features of Google Reader I depended on were aggregation and sync. I needed a replacement that had at least these two features. It would be nice if the service supported one of my favourite RSS apps. I'm exploring several options, one of which is running my news aggregation service using River 2. I set River up on a Windows AMI, but I'm not confident about it. I also think Fever° meets the need.

After setting up the software on my Linux host, I exported my OPML from Google Reader and imported it into Fever°. Fever° has an API for apps like Reeder to interact with it.

Reeder does a great job of integrating with Fever°, including adding the Hot List. I find Fever° to be faster than using Google Reader in Reeder, but that depends on the web server's performance.