Giving up on Google Reader

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…

 

3 Comments

  1. Ryan · January 2, 2012 Reply

    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.

  2. Dispersemos · January 14, 2012 Reply

    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!

  3. Barbara · January 15, 2012 Reply

    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?

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