Thing #8: RSS Feeds & Set Up a News Reader Account

I've been using the news aggregator Newsgator about a year and a half now. There were some functionality issues that I'm not happy about, so I took this opportunity to check out some of the competition. In Newsgator I was unhappy with the load time for the blogs, sometimes pictures wouldn't load or be shown, and it was time consuming to add and delete blogs from my list.



I started by looking at the news reader 23 Things suggests, Bloglines. I created an account and played around with it for a bit. I didn't really like the look of this news reader...it was plain and basic-looking. I also don't like how little space there is in the left-hand column to display the blogs I read. I read on one of our discussion boards that another classmate decided to go with Google Reader, so I thought I'd check that out.



I'm trying to create as few logons to websites as I can. With Google Reader, I'm not only aggregating my blogs and news feeds, but I'm also aggregating my logons. I like the look and feel of the Google Reader. I can get right to it after I log on my iGoogle home page. Like Bloglines, I'm not happy with the limited amount of space there is on the left-hand side of the page for the listing of the blogs I'm following, but it's a small price to pay when I consider the features I do like such as, easy addition and deletion of subscriptions, the top recommendations that have lead me to add to my subscriptions, the look of it, the sorting capabilities, and the one simple log on.