iGoogle and Google Reader
I’ve been looking at changing how I view RSS. Instead, I’ve found a way to integrate my web presence.
At the moment, I use my IM client to also read my RSS feeds. With friends’ blogs, news sites (topical and technical), technical interest groups and forums, there’s quite a few posts bubbling under, and it slows the IM client down a lot. Plus it’s a bit of a pain synchronising feeds at home and at work (OPML files would make it a little easier).
At the same time, there are things I haven’t yet started using RSS for: sites like flickr (and if they ever add syndication, facebook) take up too much of my time to go and read individually.
So, having noticed that iGoogle (google homepages was a better name) would give me better access to some of these features plus my under-used google calender, I decided that perhaps I should have another go at configuring it. Naturally, that let me to google reader.
I’m a fan of gmail, so I can see the interface for skim-reading posts very advantageous, but it doesn’t end there: by aggregating and sharing threads I can collate my activity across those various sites into a single handy feed.
Here’s an example: this has taken all my bits and pieces, posts and comments from this blog and flickr. There’s a feed link there, as well as the ability to create a web ‘clip’ to include on an independant site.
I’ve been thinking for a while that I need to create a home page that is more than just the blog here on yamahito.net. I want something that will tell people everything that I want to share on the net in a useful way. This may well be a significant step towards that.
And now here are the things wrong with it:
- I don’t seem to have any control, let alone granularity of control, over how often each thread in google reader is checked.
- Google orders items by time they were updated, not the time they were posted (although perhaps this is an RSS limitation? It should settle down as things are posted)
- Although you can share ‘tags’ (folders of RSS feeds) in Google Reader, they aren’t able to be added to your default shared items area: that means that they are totally unaccessible unless you self-publicise
- You can choose the feed title and so on of the ‘clip’ that you can add to your webpage, but you can’t choose any titles or details for RSS feeds or pages for shared tags: ‘yamahito from tomos’ comes from where? I’ve never called myself Tomos on google’s pages before (the idiots of the world refuse to spell my name correctly, so I’m normally ‘tom’), and it means very little out of context.
- As well as being unable to change the design of the above page, a third of the width is taken up by google’s self-promotion
- iGoogle is slow enough to make me doubt I can actually use it to view my feeds - although it’s a better way of organising, backing-up and distributing my feedlist.
- Neither Google Reader nor the iGoogle configuration pages work properly/at all in IE (7)
- As I was writing this, the browser hung whilst iGoogle did something unknown. After 5 mins, I gave up and went to lunch: I think it was trying to refresh feeds.
June 21st, 2007 at 2:20 pm
This post has yet to show up in the aggregated thread, after two hours and manual refreshing.
Maybe I’d be better off aggregating my own threads?
June 21st, 2007 at 2:58 pm
I tend to use IE7 for reading RSS feeds, as it’s my default browser so links open up in there and I tend to have a copy of IE open at all times. It supports OPML files, which has made it easy to move my feeds about between PCs, although I find I tend to update my main machine’s feeds manually as I tend to keep track of things on my laptop.
The aggregation thing sounds cool if you’re using a dozen different sites, but it’s usually easy enough to write your own thing (my homepage has info about my SETI stats, the combined user stats from my UK Radio Player gadget, the last couple of tracks I’ve been listening to with Winamp, and the last entry from my blog) and I think there’s probably something wrong with people if they can’t use one site to do everything (this might also be why I detest all the “social network” sites as they all do exactly the same thing, but expect me to complete the same information a billion times).
As for the ordering, I don’t believe any of the RSS/Atom standards dictate how the entries should be presented (or even what order they should be presented in the XML feed) by feed readers. Google’s ordering by the last updated isn’t a bad assumption, as RSS feeds are meant to be there to identify new content.
Have you tried the RSS feed of the aggregated content? It’s much nicer than viewing it on the page.
June 21st, 2007 at 3:46 pm
The standards don’t (and shouldn’t) dictate how they’re presented, but they often include date information. What I’m saying is that if google offer to organise items in some form of date order, they should use that information. Otherwise the feed with yesterday’s posts will appear to be less recent than a feed that has three month old entires if I add the second to google reader after the first.
June 21st, 2007 at 4:00 pm
That does seem a bit quirky if that’s what it does, I would have thought it’d abstract the individual entries so it doesn’t really matter. If you add the second after the first, althought it might be presented incorrectly on the webpage, would the RSS feed still be displayed correctly if the feed reader orders by published/updated? I’m all about the RSS feeds, so I don’t care if the page itself is out of order
(for example, one day I’ll finish writing my site so that it’ll update the entries when I update them, so that I can have a correct updated time on the RSS feed, but still present the items in date order - actually, it’s ordered by id - on the site).