Pablo Averbuj

Google Reader

I might be more habitual than the average person – some friends even suggest I have some minor OCD – so I tend to get stuck in ruts with certain tools. It took me a long time to switch from Mozilla to Firefox (in fact, I still run it on the laptop and a workstation at work). For ages I was using Trillian as my RSS reader. It worked OK until I started following a lot of blogs and then it got unwieldly. About then I discovered Google Reader and I’ve been hooked ever since. And remember that entry about I *heart* Outlook, well I’m working on switching to Google Calendar. I even added my Reader starred items to the sidebar that you’ve probably hidden because it’s annoying. I wanted to express some interesting uses of these tools.

With calendar I intend for Leigha and I to have views of each other’s calendars. The interesting use will be adding her XML feeds to my Google Reader subscriptions, so I’ll be notified when she creates new events.

I have a label in my Reader configuration called “fast”. The idea is that only a couple of my feeds (Slashdot and MakeBlog) are high volume. All the others are fairly low traffic, so I want to read those first (especially if I have a few minutes before a meeting). The trick I learned today is using Firefox’s live bookmarks in conjuntion with my shared “fast”-labeled feed.

Some other things I’ve been wanting to get off my chest: Firefox’s memory leaking is completely annoying (I don’t think Mozilla ever got quite as large as Firefox seems to get). The other thing is that WordPress’s arbitrary decision to NOT thumbnail images greater than 3 megapixels is arbitrary, stupid, and not configurable. They seem to think this is not a problem. Finally, DilbertBlog is probably the funniest and most interesting subscription I have. I stay up late at nights just reading old posts.