Google Reader: Getting Setup
After sometime of exclusively using RSS Ticker and Live Bookmarks in Firefox, I decided to try another aggregator. After soliciting suggestions from colleagues, I decided to give Google Reader a test drive. I thought my experiences might be of use to others so I am chronicling them here. I this article I will walk through the various steps I used in setting up Google Reader for basic feed reading. In later articles I will explore Google Reader features and how to use it more effectively.
The first thing I was exposed to was this video. Maybe Chris is a little too happy about Google Reader, we will see. So, on to the real work. Google Reader presents the user with three initial ways of subscribing to feeds; feed bundles, user feeds from a variety of social sites such as Blogger or Flickr, and search and browse.
The first feed I wanted to add was 3Monkeys, so I chose the search feature. I was a little surprised by the results. There were 20 feeds in the results and the 3Monkey feed was included along with feeds to some of my social networking sites and several blogs that had written stories about me. What was a little disturbing is that some feeds where listed multiple times, in particular digg was listed 5 times, 3Monkeys 4 times, and del.icio.us and Netscape twice each. I would think that Google would have done a better job at identifying and limiting duplicate entries. I happened to notice a few other areas where Google could improve:
- The search did not indicate how many matches occurred, I actually had to count the results. While this is of little concern for such a small number of results as 3Monkeys, other searches may provide thousands of results. It would be nice to see the number of matches in order to know when you should refine your search terms.
- The individual results have very little preview content and are not click-able. I think previewing the feed to be certain it is the one you want is an essential feature Google should add.
- Since the search for 3Monkeys did span more than one page, when I had navigated to the second page and wanted to return to the first page I clicked the “Back” button in my browser. That was a mistake. Google reader makes heavy use of AJAX and this action caused me to return to the site I had previously been viewing.
Once I added 3Monkeys, I noticed that Google Reader updated each of the listed results for 3Monkeys as being subscribed. A slight improvement, but I would rather have duplicates eliminated.
Next, I wanted to explore the bundles. Google Reader provides three bundle categories in the main browse page, News, Sports and Fun, with a link to an additional 12 categories. While an interesting concept, I found that the overall makeup of the bundles was some what lacking. In most bundles there were feeds I was interested in, however there were just as many or more that I was not. It would be more effective for the new user to have a choice of individual feeds separated by topic rather than these prepackaged bundles. Google does provide this type of functionality in some sense by supplying a few topic searches at the bottom of the page: All, News, Fun & Games, Finance, Sports, Lifestyle, Technology
The social network feeds method of subscribing to feeds was of no help to me. Currently only seven sites are supported: Blogger, del.icio.us, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and Xanga. If you have friends on any of these sites this may be of interest to you.
What I was interested in was importing my Live Bookmark feeds from Firefox. Separated from the other feed population methods is an Import your subscriptions link. This link takes you to a setting screen where you may import an OPML list of feeds. Since Firefox does not naively support OPML export of Live Bookmarks, the first order of business was to download and install the OPML Support plugin. The plugin installs fine and is easy enough to use. Below are two screen shots of the process used to export my Live Bookmarks as an OPML file.
The File -> Export -> OPML Option is added by the OPML Support plugin
Change “What do you want to export?” to Livemarks
The resulting OPML file was then successfully uploaded in the Import/Export Settings screen in Google Reader. If you are switching from another reader and have many existing feeds, I strongly suggest using this feature.
Next, I set out to organize my feeds into topic folders. This was one of the reasons I had decided to try a new reader in the first place. After the import Google Reader redirected my to the Settings -> Subscription page.
Click to enlarge
This allowed me to quickly move feeds into appropriate folders, rename feeds more descriptively and remove feeds that I no longer read. One issue I found while organizing my feeds, was that when I added a new folder, while that folder name would be displayed for the feed, it did not appear in the drop-downs for other feeds. Since, many of my feeds were being moved to common folders, this was a little annoying. I worked around this by navigating back to the main Google Reader page, and then back to the Settings page. This would refresh the drop-down content. Another annoyance was the inability to preview the feeds while sorting them in to folders.
So there you have it, the steps needed to setup a Google Reader account and start receiving feeds. Next time we will look at ways to effectively use Google Reader.
Until next time-
-3Monkeys
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January 21st, 2007 at 1:02 am
I subscribe to your RSS feed, and imagine my surprise seeing not one, but two of my extensions (RSS Ticker and OPML Support) mentioned in the same blog post. Glad to see you’re getting some use out of them.
January 21st, 2007 at 1:43 am
[...] Original post by 3monkeys and software by Elliott Back [...]
January 21st, 2007 at 3:51 pm
Google Reader: Getting Setup…
The first thing I was exposed to was this video. Maybe Chris is a little too happy about Google Reader, we will see. So, on to the real work. Google Reader presents the user with three initial ways of subscribing to feeds; feed bundles, user feeds from…
January 24th, 2007 at 9:39 am
[...] The first thing I was exposed to was this video. Maybe Chris is a little too happy about Google Reader, we will see. So, on to the real work. Google Reader presents the user with three initial ways of subscribing to feeds; feed bundles, user feeds from a variety of social sites such as Blogger or Flickr, and search and browse.read more | digg story [...]
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