Feedly Groovy
A new year, a new blog and let’s start with a new web app. Thanks to Judy for twittering about Feedly. I started reading blogs about a year ago and really liked visiting the actual blog site due to the visual experience – there is a reason why people choose their themes and widgets, isn’t there!
The trouble with that method was that I had to remember to visit them regularly to see any updates.
After NECC08, I finally succumbed to an RSS reader. The first one I tried I hated (can’t even remember what it was), it was just full of unformatted text and no visuals. Later I tried Google reader which I liked a lot more and then moved onto using Google Reader in iGoogle. I was quite happy with it as I could check my feeds and twitter in the one window and the feeds looked a lot nicer and much closer to the real thing.
For the past few days I’ve been using Feedly. I love the magazine format with the side bar that lists the blog names and how many posts for each blog. Below that, it shows the blogroll of the blog that is selected. I’ve already added several more feeds due to this.
It’s easy to use, it looks nice and I’m much more likely to read more blog posts. There are a few things I’m not sure about: I can’t get my head around the ’spring cleaning’ button and how to get my feeds into categories.
Feedly adds a button to Firefox and I think it is popping up some other functions (on a thin left side bar) when you are on a blog page – not game to press those buttons yet in case I accidentally spam my PLN.
As a feed reader I would reccommend it highly – but warning, it may drastically increase the number of blogs you subscribe to.
