Friday, October 07, 2005

Google Reader

Update 12 Oct 2005: I don't think I explicitly mentioned this here, but to create an "Add to Google Reader" link from your blog, the anchor you should use is:

<a href="http://www.google.com/reader/preview/*/feed/http://YourFeedHere">

Thank you to Steve, John, Wang, Hunter and everybody else who linked here.


Update 8 Oct 2005: Brenton created one-click buttons for Google Reader that I'm using in my sidebar now.      Please don't hotlink; copy the button to your own website.

Update 7 Oct 2005: I added a Google Reader subscribe button. You can find it in the left navigation bar. I'm not quite certain that it will work in every instance, but I think the problems I'm seeing right now are due to heavy load on the Google Feeder servers. If you see an error other than "Server Busy" please let me know by leaving a comment below.

Google has just released Google Reader, an online web-based feed reader something like Bloglines. I'll play with it some more and give you my impressions, but so far it seems similar to Bloglines in some respects. Reader doesn't seem to offer nearly the functionality and usefulness of Bloglines. Google loves heavy client-side code crunching and on my PC that's resulting in some klunkiness in the UI, though the keyboard shortcuts are handy. I haven't figured out (yet) how to create an instant-subscribe button from my blog, but I'll put it up as soon as I find a solution. For now, though, I'm off to run some errands and get some lunch on my bike.

Via Search Engine Watch. Is this the end of Bloglines?


Google Reader preview screen


Tags: , , , , , . Tags generated by Tag-o-matic.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the tip Fritz! I'll have to check that out. I use bloglines right now and am surprised at the lack of enhancements it has had. Recently it has not allowed me to access it using my mobile browser on my smartphone. Anyway, I am a big fan of the web-based feed reader as opposed to a client based one so that I can keep up with my favorite blogs from any computer. To those that have not embraced a feed-reader of some sort, why not?

John said...

Great new hack. I'm curious about whether reader content can be easily transfered / cross-posted to the Google personal homepage. Let's see!!

A thought for the one-click add. The subscribe button doesn't really stand out to me when viewing the site in preview....

...that could just be me!! ;-)

Yokota Fritz said...

I'm not sure what you mean, John. This is a screen cap of the preview screen in Google Reader. The subscribe button is highlighted in that image. I'll add it as an image to the post also.

Pete LaVerghetta said...

I love me some Google, but I'm not sure I see a compelling reason to switch from Bloglines just yet. What does it do that Bloglines doesn't do?

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the logo. It appears to be working.

Peter Fleck said...

Why use Google Reader? Labels (tags). (Plus you can 'star' things like gmail.) Also connects nicely with your blogger blog for blogging interesting posts and connects with gmail.

But it's slow and in terms of Google Betas, I think this more an alpha. It seemed to be causing Firefox to malfunction on my Mac last night, forcing me to quit the browser.