Reading The News Shouldn't Be This Intense

When you heard that Newsgator was ending their free online RSS reading service, did you imagine a raspy hiss of a scream off in the distance? Because to be honest all I really did was just rub my aching forehead and export my OPML file.

Then I started to write this post. This is how I felt a week ago:

I can't take to Google Reader. I tried, I even have a copy of my feeds in Google Reader that I open and mark as read every weekend because I take one look at it and wince.

But now that's what Newsgator is telling their users to use.

An offline reader is out because I go back and forth between computers. While I could probably set one up the way I did Agent, the usenet reader, but I don't want to.

I thought I'd give BlogLines a try, and maybe if you've been reading this blog a long time you're thinking, "But...you did...."

I found I had a BlogLines account!

With 25,976 unread items.

I deleted everything and imported my database again, then marked the 33000+ items in there as read. I figure I'll clean out Newsgator and then pick up on Bloglines. Sure. I'll have that done in a month. Definitely.

(Betting on how soon I'll forget this starts now. I'm in the 1-2 days pool.)

9 days after I wrote all that, you know what?

I LOVE GOOGLE READER! :D

I don't know if they changed it or I just sucked it up and got on with it, as I'm doing these days--making myself do stuff even if it makes me wince and retch and flail around and go numb. Not that Google Reader has done any of that yet. Therefore Google Reader is better than Life 3.5!

But I guess you knew that already.

There are 3113 unread items in Bloglines because I'm not using it, I'm using Google Reader, which has no unread items, because I frikkin' love it!

Reading The News Shouldn't Be This Intense

Fear of Change Beta

Look, an actual experiment! And it is very mediocre. I've taken to reading RSS feeds of things. For one thing, they can sit, and sit, and sit some more until I am in the perfect frame of mind to read the things I want to. For another thing, I used to break Firefox opening everything in tabs at one time. So I chose Newsgator a while back, and I've had no real complaints with it. I split things into folders, like the Rathergood.com stuff and Monkeys for Helping go in a folder I like to call "crazy," because that's what I favor most in this world, and then there are folders named "Blogs" and "News" and "Music" and so on and on until my little Internet world is more organized than the real one.

Then Newsgator's gotta go and announce they're phasing out their "classic" reader in favor of some souped-up version that has little pop-up windows to let you know things are loading, so, you know, you won't forget. My initial thought on seeing the loading window was, "How long does it take for the loading window to load? They could just load my damn page and it might be faster."

Because this is eventually what I'll have to use if I want to stay with Newsgator (which, believe me, I'm like people who keep rebuilding in flood belts), I decided to go ahead and let them hit me with the beta nonsense. Of course I hate the whole thing, and it's slower than the classic reader, and there are two scroll bars and it wasn't like before and so I no longer recognize this thing I've invited into my eyes.

I used to be a beta tester, you know. Once, long ago. I think I was too critical of the project I was testing for, because I was never asked to do it again. I'm still not sure if I can talk about it, but all I'll say is it never took off, so there.

But I digress. I popped over to the Newsgator forum to give some feedback, and after sifting through thread after thread of, "It works fine for me, what are you using?" I gave up, because this world, it's not meant for people who want things to work for everyone, including the poor kid up the street with a hand-me-down Windows 95 box or the old guy who could swear that screen looked different yesterday*. So what if I have to click the checkmark three times to mark something read? That only means I click too fast. (And I do, baby. My fingers are wicked fast, numbness and all.) I have predictions about the next thousand years that go this way. "Asthma? What kind of weak-ass lungs do you have, this smells great to me." Or was that the past? Maybe my prediction is really my past, and it just took this long to load.

*Not actual people I know, unless you count my split personalities**, and you shouldn’t, because you haven’t met them—they can’t get on the web, they don’t know how.

**This footnote was not meant to poke fun at those with multiple personalities who may be adept at technology.

Fear of Change Beta