How Google Reader became my favorite RSS news reader

I’ve been involved with RSS news readers since early 2001 or so, back in the days when RSS was still in its early stages and when blogs were virtually unheard of.

My first RSS news reader was AmphetaDesk - it’s probably the grandfather of RSS readers. It was quite a neat idea back then to have one application where you could read news and stories from many websites instead of running around the web to see the latest articles on each separate site. I think it was an application that was ahead of its time - not too many people knew about it, but it made such a big difference for those who discovered it and learned how to use it.

Not too long after that I discovered a number of web sites that allowed me to read aggregated news directly on the web - I’ve mentioned these in a different post. They were a great resource but they had one major drawback - I didn’t have much control over which sites they pulled feeds from. It was nice to have a quick place to look at news stories and posts but I soon realized that I wanted more control over the content.

Once I started this blog I realized even more that I needed a better way to follow all the blogs I wanted to read for inspiration and ideas. I had a few Windows-based RSS readers that I tried over time but, for one reason or another, I really wasn’t impressed with any of them. In some of the earlier versions of these apps there was one thing that always bothered me - while I was able to control the various RSS feeds, I felt that the user interface lacked a bit in giving me good control over how I read the posts, which ones I wanted to revisit, and which ones I could let go. I never really knew for sure what posts I read and what I still had to look at.

I finally decided to try Google Reader since I read so much about it on the web - and I also liked the idea of having a good web-based RSS reader that I could access from all the computers I use. Well, as soon as I started using it I noticed something odd - as I was browsing around the various feeds, articles were just mysteriously disappearing. It didn’t take me long to figure out that Google Reader was trying to get cute on me and by default was marking articles as read as soon as I looked at them. That was exactly the problem I had with some of the Windows-based RSS readers that I tried earlier - nice feature for those who need it but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

As soon as I realized what was going on I started looking for a way to turn off that feature. I found it eventually under preferences, in the section called ‘Scroll tracking’. Now I can mark articles and posts as read on my terms - moving around subscriptions doesn’t mark posts as read just because I look at them. That’s the way I like it

Such a simple concept yet it’s probably what enabled me to get attached to Google Reader. There are so many other things to discover in there - I read a lot about the various keyboard shortcuts - but for now I’m quite happy to just be able to follow my favorite blogs with a user interface that works the way I want it.

Filed under: Computers, Productivity