April 29, 2013

Changing RSS reader for keeping up with blogs

I've been very happy with Google Reader, so was disappointed to hear that it will no longer be functioning after July 1.  I've been keeping an eye out for blog-land discussions of other RSS feed readers, and last night tried out the three I'd seen mentioned a number of times:  bloglovin', feedly, and The Old Reader.  I much prefer The Old Reader to the other two.  As its name indicates, the idea of this one is to stay as close as possible to the "old" Google Reader, and since I was happy with that, it's not surprising I like this one.  It has an additional feature or two that I also like:  You can easily mark all entries in one blog as read (handy if one is getting behind), and can even mark all unread entries in all blogs as unread.  The last feature was useful when I first opened the reader with my feeds, as they each showed with 10 or more entries as unread.  I knew I had just read all current entries in Reader, so I could mark as read all that were coming into The Old Reader and clear the decks.

I did the transfer of subscribed feeds starting from The Old Reader, which is also linked up with Google.  There were a couple of steps, but I just followed the directions and it came out fine.

The Old Reader also works well on my iPad, accessed through Safari rather than needing a separate app.

So, transfer now done!