With all that has been happening here this summer, life has been crazy and hectic. Along the way I didn’t spend my usual time schedule on the computer and was doing more of a grab a minute here, or a minute there, get lost in a certain social site and lose an hour (or more) type of life.
Now that things are settled down (and I say that hesitantly cause we all know how “THAT” goes!), I’m trying to catch up to a normal computer life for myself. My old life (before this summer and getting lost in social “stuff”) consisted of morning coffee with my I-google homepage and my Google Reader. After a cup of coffee, I would feel in touch with what was going on worldwide and head off to start my day. As I said, this summer it’s been grab here, grab there, get lost in social media, lose time, run out the door feeling frustrated and behind. Not the best way to start your day.
So this morning I decided to remedy the situation. If there is a remedy to a constantly changing social/technological world for someone that likes things to remain consistently recognizable (especially at morning coffee time!).
Earlier this summer, I had grabbed the “Feedly” reader when I did a quickly terminated attempt at using Google Chrome. But I really don’t care for Feedly. You might, and that’s okay, but I didn’t. The homepage never did set up to a comfortable (for me) way of reading blogs, and I do get easily frustrated trying to navigate around something that my mind says should be simple. Today I went blog reader hunting again and found a few new (to me) options. A few options that came up were NewsBlur, Newsvibe, and The Old Reader.
On further investigation here are my results.
NewsBlur, would not work for me as it’s limited unless you pay an annual subscription fee. You can, for free, follow up to 64 sites. Over that you must pay the fee. And in my old feed I have over a hundred blogs that I followed. Nope, not going to work unless I have no other choice. Hey, I pay enough for internet access already, between the internet service, and the upgraded programming for certain blogs I own, and the cost of running my quilting business website. Then there’s the anti-virus programming charge and …… well you get the picture. So strike that one off the list.
Newsvibe sounded like a great program. Except I couldn’t add any feeds to it. Neither by trying to import my Ighome feeds, nor by manually adding a feed. It would tell me it added the feed, but then not show it when I refreshed my subscription list. After three or four tries I gave up. Did I mention my limited patience for technology?
Finally I tried The Old Reader. Now I’m NOT going to proclaim this as the next and best since sliced bread site. But, so far it seems to be adequate for me. It has three columns, like most sites I use. On the left is a subscription listing. In the middle a frame for new posts or to read/glance at new feeds. On the right is the frame I like best as the very first heading is “Recently Updated” which shows current feeds.
The only major drawback to this whole experience is that I did not export my Google Reader feeds before they shut down and I have now gone from following over 100 blogs about many varied topics, to just 8 that I can easily remember or find. Although maybe the silver lining in that is that I’ll actually finish my cup of coffee earlier now and move on to other things on my daily to-do list.
As for my I-Google home page, it’s not gone yet, but they say it will be on November first. So for now I’m trying out IgHome as a substitute and it seems to work for my visual preferences. I choose the gadgets I want to see, it’s a three column setup (yes I really like that) and it’s a clean page. Not a lot of social media stuff on it. Well, okay, I will admit I did immediately delete the Twitter and Facebook gadgets. But that’s another story for another day.
In the meantime, now that I’ve got a “hopefully” workable and time saving way to catch up on morning news, I’ll refind my old favorite blogs, gain a little more time each day, and slowly wean myself away from the time draining website I’ve come to visit all too often! But then again, we (or I) do get addicted to certain sites and find myself not quite ever able to draw away totally! 😉