JC - Technology and Stuff

It used to be that I read the newspaper every day. It used to be that I read computer magazines like they were going out of fashion. Times have changed. I no longer have a 6 foot high pile of PC magazines by my bed (I do actually have a 3 foot pile of Wired, Smithsonian and National Geographic magazines though). Instead, the majority of my reading is now done online. And I say reading online and I mean it. I don’t just mean I read the odd article, I actually do a lot of reading. Probably as much as I used to 15 years ago, it’s just that the medium is different. The only thing that has suffered has been my book reading. I think I need to get one of those Kindles from Amazon. Maybe that will revitalize my book reading too.

Anyway I digress. News has always been something that is important to me. I still religiously watch the local and national news every day on TV and read CNN.com and other news sites online. I also still read all about technology and other associated topics. I do all this reading via Google Reader. I’ve tried several RSS aggregate readers over the years and finally I’ve found one I really like. So today I thought I’d blog a little about it just in case it’s of interest to anyone out there!

Subscribing to feeds (news stories and articles) is easy using Firefox and Google Reader (it’s almost as easy in Internet Explorer - I just don’t use that browser). Whenever you browse to a site that has a RSS feed available a little icon appears in your browser address bar and you can click on it. Clicking opens up a dialog box asking how you want to subscribe. For me I have my browser automatically set up to send all feeds to Google Reader if I select them. Once they’re in Google Reader all I need to do is set up a few settings and we’re good to go. Firstly I have my feeds assigned to different categories (see below). This lets me browse news articles by topic if I want. Then I set up my feeds to display in reverse order so that I ensure I read old articles first. Lastly I set my reader to only display unread items. This saves me from scrolling through everything all the time (see below).

To read an article you just click on the feed and scroll through the text. The contents of the articles will vary according to the feed; some articles will be rich with text and pictures and others may just be headlines requiring you to ‘click through’ to the detailed article. If you need to ‘click through’ I would recommend that you right click and open a new tab to read the article. That way you will retain the reader open where you left off.

But all this is just the beginning. A news reader is no good if you can’t use it as a reference source. This is where I think Google Reader scores such good marks. Today I’m going to write about a couple of the special features that the reader has; Star and Share.

Starred Items - Whenever I come across an article that I find interesting and I know I’ll want to refer back to it later, or just haven’t got time to process right now (for example there’s a link to a piece of software I want to try out later), I mark the item with a ’star’. All my ’starred’ items are then available separately whenever I want. Every two weeks or so I go through my starred items and process the ones that I can and if appropriate I will un-star the item. This way my list is always up to date with items that I think I need to do something with. I love this feature.

Shared Items - Similar to starred items are ’shared’ items. You can choose to set up part of your feed as public and share it with the rest of the world. There are settings to make all this happen. You also get a url you can use to share this feed with the world. I use my url and publish my shared feed on my blog (LINK). This way if I read anything that I think others may be interested in reading too, anyone can see it on my blog. Also, just so you know, you can mark an article with both a star and share it, and any combination.

I’ll write more on Google Reader in my next blog post…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 12th, 2008 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Home, PC Tool, Technology, Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.