Andrew Grant

I’m a great fan of your service. You have a growing number of competitors, but I find they often cast the net too wide and don’t match your signal-to-noise ratio.

But there’s a problem.

Nearly every frickin day my subscription to your RSS feed for “Media Center” contains several pieces of worthless spam with the title ‘Philippine Condo Hotels or Condotels “Open The Door To Lifestyle Real Estate”‘.

If you can’t block a piece of spam that has a consistent title, then what hope do you have when tag-spammers move from stuffing posts with tags to something a bit cleverer?

Please fix it.

Signed,

A Usually Happy User.

I’ve noticed that regardless of how the subscription occurred, Google Reader now allows you to assign your new feed to a folder. When this feature was first added it worked only for for feeds added within Reader, a method I found I barely used. I’m sure most people subscribe to feeds they stumble upon in their browser so this change is very welcome.

It’s great that the team keep adding these little fixes and enhancements, but I do wish there was an official change-log somewhere In past updates there have been some nice little things tweaked that I’ve completely missed until finding them while changing another setting!

Over the Thanksgiving break I spent some time trying out the mobile version of Google Reader on my T-Mobile MDA, via both Wi-Fi and GPRS. It’s an impressive and clean frontend, but unfortunately there are a few minor design flaws that can make the experience a little cumbersome.

(more…)

I discovered the benefits of using RSS/Atom Feeds over two years ago. Feeds are a method by which users may subscribe to websites and have the latest content delivered to them, without the need to visit the sites in question. If you read a number of websites the main  benefits are two-fold; Not only is content delivered to you as it is created, but you do not waste time visiting sites that have not been updated. Using Feeds I found I was able to read about more topics that interest me in a far shorter time.

After trying various ways of reading feeds I eventually settled on a combination of FeedDemon and NewsGator Online. FeedDemon was fast and efficient, the synchronization via NewsGator Online meant that items read on my home PC were marked as read on my work PC, and vice-versa. I could also use the NewsGator Online website to check feeds from any webbrowser.

Google Reader, a web-based solution, was one of the products I passed over in favor of FeedDemon. When the Google Reader team released a new version at the end of last month I decided to try it out for a few days. Exporting/importing OPML feeds makes it easy to try out different readers without the need to recreate subscriptions.

My ‘few days’ has almost become three weeks, and I find it hard to imagine going back to FeedDemon and NewsGator.

(more…)