Jonathan’s Outlook

I have been trying to find a nice RSS over the last few months, but have for the most part, not found anything to my liking.

I would’ve liked to have my RSS feeds hooked into my browser in some way, but none of the extensions I have found have been very good and I’m not a fan of the Live Bookmarks feature in FireFox.

That leaves one with the choice of using a standalone desktop version and I did find a few that I liked in this realm including a simple one in FeedReader and a more complicated one in Omea Reader.

Using these though requires that I have another application open and that I actually remember to open it. The other downside is that if I am away from my regular PC then I don’t get to check out the feeds I am subscribed to.

Enter Google Reader.

Google Reader is the project of Google labs and is basically an online RSS Reader.

I have a little bit of a reservation with it with regards to how it gets the feeds and the impact it has on my bandwidth use (coming from South Africa where bandwidth is an expensive commodity), but doubt it really has any significant impact.

It is a great boon to me in that it is lightweight, functional, I can tag the various articles, it is linked to my Google Account and I can get my feeds wherever I am in the world!

It is still a bit of a pain in that I have to remember to open it every now and again to check (which is kind of against the point of RSS), but I still have to do that with e desktop app anyway and since I’m in my browser most of the day, it’s not really a problem.

Another cool feature, although I haven’t tried this yet, is that you can actually use Google Reader offline! Yes, offline! As crazy as that sounds, apparently if you install the Google Gears extension for FireFox (and I presume there is an IE equivalent), then you can use Google Reader while not being connected to the net!

So if you’re looking for a simple, functional and online RSS reader, give Google Reader a try!