What Google Reader told me this morning. Gee, thanks.
It is the last day of the winter break and grades are due tomorrow. Which means, of course, that I am doing everything BUT posting my grades. It’s not that I haven’t finished reviewing my students work and their self evaluations…I have, that’s done (and I will be blogging about that soon). It’s just the finality of it all… and the fact that I don’t know when/if I will be teaching that course again (more on that later).
So, when in doubt…clean. I decided to try and clean up and maybe even use my Google Reader page. It had been a while since I last checked in. Several of my friends’ blogs had changed domain names (whoops). Bitch PhD (whom I followed) long ago quit her job and went into the Private sector (double whoops). Yeah, my Google Reader feeds were a mess. So I tried to clean it up and re subscribe to things.
The problem is that Google Reader’s interface is SO TERRIBLE that once I got things set up (sort of) I just wanted to lay down and take a nap out of exhaustion. And not read any of the feeds. Which, of course, defies the purpose altogether now dunnit?
After chatting/complaining/whining with Ryan (who shares this opinion), I asked him how he got his updates on people’s blogs etc. Simple: Twitter. (slap to forehead) Oh and Reddit (aka “The Front Page of the Internet”). Which I don’t know anything about and now need to learn. (Poke poke poke to Ryan… hoping for a comment with info on how to use Reddit below).
So back to Twitter I go. Huzzah.
In the meantime if any of you LLU readers have any language/ language-tech/ tech related bloggers/twitterers you think are worthy of following please comment below.
Hmmm, now that’s done…off to clean the kitchen, I guess…
Challenge accepted.
I’ve written up my experience with Google Reader alternatives, in terms of both RSS aggregation and community building, on my other blog.
I agree about Google Reader — the interface was not visually appealing or helpful in viewing lots of feeds. My preferred reader is NetVibes. I like the interface for organizing and displaying feeds as blocks (“widgets” view) and the ability to create tabs with feeds organized by category. I use my private Netvibes page as my browser home page and can easily see and choose which posts to read from all my favorite sites — like this one!
Thanks for the suggestion! I will give it a look-see. At this point I am still struggling to find feeds that 1) are still active and 2) are relevant to the language-technology world. I am open to suggestions! Which feeds do you follow?