Press is on the list for (free) Feedly support too.
Press is a $3 Android-only news reader app that was originally designed to work with Google Reader, but with the new update it can now sync with a number of other news reader services.
Yesterday’s update adds support for Feed Wrangler and FeedBin.
via The Digital Reader.
Time’s getting close, so this is good news. Feedly for iPad, iPhone Updated – No Longer Dependent on Google Reader via The Digital Reader.
Reeder [Mac, iPhone & iPad] announced it will use Feedbin to manage its backend subscription functionality. Details at TUAW including information on Feedbin’s web platform.
Flipboard [iPad, iPhone and Android - free] has been a favorite reading app for some time. One of the very nice things about Flipboard is that it doesn’t just use Google Reader – or RSS for that matter – as the only source for the content in the app. It will pull in content from Twitter (it follows the links in tweets and pulls in the content at the other end of the link), Facebook, LinkedIn and a number of other social platforms as well as a growing collection of unique news sources.
On March 13th, they released an announcement to all Flipboard users that they wouldn’t lose their Google Reader content after the shutdown. The subscription list will be saved in your Flipboard account and you can add RSS feeds at any time. The only thing you have to do is insure you have a Flipboard account set up. This is necessary to keep your content options saved and to sync that content from one device to another. Tap on the red ribbon at the top of the home screen, then tap the Accounts item. This is where you set up both your Flipboard account and the social networks you want pulled into it.
Flipboard doesn’t have a desktop or web-based app, nor does it have as many sharing options as Reeder and other reading apps, but it provides one of the best reading experiences I’ve seen on any platform. If you read most of your news on a tablet, Flipboard may well be the best option to replace Google Reader.
The folks at Digg have announced they are working on a reader to replace Google Reader. According to their blog post, it was already on the todo list but is now a priority item on that list. It will be interesting to see what they produce.
Not sure how you’re going to deal with the demise of Google Reader? Don’t be too concerned – alternatives (good ones!) are already showing up and there will be a lot more coming.
In the meantime, here are some steps you can take now to help you move to a different platform:
FYI – Flipboard is already out front on this issue with their announcement Flipboard users won’t
need to do anything to keep reading their Google Reader subscriptions in Flipboard. If you’ve got Flipboard set up with Google Reader now, you’ll still have those subscriptions after Reader shuts down. Flipboard will do the work so you don’t have to. My guess is they won’t be the only ones who see this as an opportunity . . .
Check the suggested posts below for additional information on RSS subscriptions and Twitter for news reading. The Gazette will post the latest in news and apps to make your move to a new newsreading platform as painless as possible.
One of the many reasons for genea-blogging is to connect with others. Almost daily you’ll see stories where a research cousin is discovered and a connection is made thanks to a search query or a reference from someone who saw a blog post. While blogs – WordPress, Blogger and all the others – are very search-friendly by design, there are several things you can do to increase your visibility. And, you can take advantage of the growing number of distribution systems to expand your readership.
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is the process used to get more visibility from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. Search engines are constantly “crawling” the Web looking for new content and indexing it. Each of the major search engines has its own – very secret – process for finding and ranking content and these processes are adjusted regularly. Rather than trying to “play” the search engines for ranking, here are a couple of basic steps to take to insure your content is search engine friendly:
Although search engines will help others discover your blog, don’t expect them to stop by regularly to check out your latest stories. There’s just no way to make a daily visit to every blog I find interesting. Fortunately, there are a growing number of ways I can have the latest posts from all the blogs I follow delivered to my desktop, tablet or even my phone – automatically. However, this will only work if you are taking advantage of those distribution options to insure your content gets delivered.
Most blog systems support the RSS (really simple syndication) standard to present each post in a standard format that computer systems can understand and process. Most of the online news sites you visit are using this standard to collect and display news stories from around the world. WordPress automatically assumes you will be using RSS to distribute your content. You’ll find options defining your feeds in the Settings > Reading screen. You determine the maximum number of recent posts to be sent in your RSS feed and whether to send full text of the post (recommended) or just a summary. To take advantage of RSS feeds, your readers will need some kind of news reader app (Google Reader is the most popular). They will then subscribe to your feed and the reader will automatically check your site on a regular basis – usually hourly – to see if there’s any new content. If there is, it will be collected and displayed in your reader. See “Research Delivered: The Newsreader” for more information on how RSS feeds and subscriptions work.
Today there are even more distribution options available including the growing number of social networks being used to connect with friends and family online. WordPress.com makes it easy to automatically announce each new post on your profile at your favorite social site. All you need to do is go to the Settings > Sharing page and connect your blog to your account at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and more under the Publicize section. As discussed in “A New Look at News Reading”, Twitter is quickly becoming a major player in news distribution so I recommend you include it as a distribution option. Once you set up your connection to Twitter, you’ll see a Publicize: Twitter option in each post’s Publish box. If you do nothing, WordPress will send a status message containing the post title and link to Twitter as soon as you publish the post. You can click the Edit link to display and edit the message if you wish.
While WordPress.com users have distribution options at their fingertips, self-hosted sites require a bit more effort. WP to Twitter is a great plugin to announce your posts in Twitter. It lets you define a default post format and you can customize the message for individual posts. Plugins for Facebook are a bit more difficult since they usually require you set up an application in Facebook first. I use the Networked Blogs service from within Facebook to post to both my profile and my Moultrie Creek page.
Improving your distribution system will improve your visibility and increase your ranking in search engines which will help your research cousins find you. Take the few minutes needed to set up these systems. After that, WordPress will do the work for you. You can’t lose!
Like most of us, Google Reader has been my goto app for keeping up with the news and blogs. It does an efficient job of processing hundreds of articles a day, but it is not the most pleasant reading experience. My iPad has shown that reading syndicated content can be a delight and I want to be able to enjoy that experience regardless of the the device I’m using.
When I stumbled on feedly, it was the design that first caught my eye. While an RSS feed leaves the style sheet back at the original site, that doesn’t mean the news reader should ignore style. feedly delivers. Not only does it arrange the latest content in an attractive newspaper style, the reading pane is also pleasing to the eye yet still provides all the processing and sharing tools in easy reach.
It synchronizes with Google Reader so you can enjoy feedly when you have time to read and put Google Reader to work when you need to push through a lot of stuff quickly.
One feature I’ve truly enjoyed is the suggested topics. In the right sidebar above, you’ll notice the list titled “you might also like” which points you to other sites related to the topic you’re currently viewing. This has led me to several fascinating digital publishing blogs and some interesting genea-related sites. I don’t always have time to wander through the suggestions, but when I do I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
feedly is available as a plugin for the Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers and there are apps for both iOS and Android devices. There is no charge to use it. The video below is a quick tour. Take a look and see if you don’t find feedly a delightful option for reading your favorite genea-bloggers.
Feed Your Mind On The Go from Feedly on Vimeo.
I’ve never been a big fan of desktop newsreaders. I need to keep up with tech news both at home and at work and desktop readers just couldn’t keep my feed content synched in both locations. While Google Reader does keep me in sync and allows me to process a lot of information quickly, its design leaves a lot to be desired. So, when I discovered the Reeder app for my iPad [iOS - $4.99], I was instantly hooked. It syncs to my Google Reader subscriptions so I’m not processing the same content twice, but it provides a much more enjoyable reading experience and it’s in-app browser makes it easy to view the item at its home site if I want. I can quickly process content and sharing items via Twitter, Facebook or email is a breeze. It’s delightful.
Reeder for the iPad
Now, there’s Reeder [$9.99] for Mac desktop users. It’s everything the iPad version is and more.
Reeder for Mac
It has all the design and content-processing functionality of the mobile app, but adds two-way synching with Google Reader. I can not only add subscriptions from the desktop version, I can organize them too. My updates on the Reeder side are synched back to my Google Reader account. And, the sharing options include access to Google Mobilizer and Instapaper Mobilizer – services that make the linked site mobile friendly. Reeder also works with Apple’s Trackpad (next on my wish list) so I can use the same gestures for moving around the app as I do on the iPad.
Reeder on my iPad has made keeping up the news and blog feeds an enjoyable experience. Now the Mac version gives me the same experience on my desktop. Life is good!
Until recently, a large number of news reading platforms existed giving readers many options to aggregate and read news from many sources through the “magic” of RSS. Until Google Reader developed their subscription synchronization service, moving subscriptions from one reader to another required the export/import of an OPML file. OPML – or Outline Processor Markup Language – is an XML format used for outlines. It has proved to be useful for several other uses including a format for moving subscription information from one newsreader to another. Take a look in the Settings area of your newsreader and you’ll likely see an Import/Export feature. This is where you can save (Export) your subscription information to your computer as a backup, to share with others or to move to a different newsreader application.
Why am I bringing this up now? With all the reading apps – desktop, iOS, Android, etc. – offering some truly amazing reading experiences, I’m looking at ways to collect select feeds and organize them to take advantage of these reader’s capabilities. While Google Reader – and my iPad’s Reeder app that synchs with it – is still an important research tool for processing large numbers of search and update feeds, it doesn’t let me sit back and enjoy my favorite blogs and columnists like The Early Edition app. So, as I build my personal news magazine, I’ll putting OPML to work again to make it happen.
An OPML file isn’t pretty, but with a closer look, you’ll see how well-defined its parts are. In the example shown here [WARNING! This is an old screenshot and many of the displayed sites have moved or disappeared.] you’ll see
This is the beginning of a category of feeds – in this case the genealogy category. What you don’t see in this screenshot is the </outline> tag that closes this section. All of the feed items listed in between these two tags will be feeds for genealogy-related sites. The outline tags inside this category have a “type” attributed that identifies them as rss feeds, a title and the URL (address) to their RSS feed.
You can create an OPML by exporting your existing subscriptions in Google Reader. Go to the Reader Settings page and choose the Import/Export tab. Now all you do is click once to export all your subscriptions as one file. If you want to take a look at it, you can open it in Notepad or TextEdit. If you’re like me and have hundreds of subscriptions, the result will probably be overwhelming. It will all be run together instead of each tag having its own line like in my example. If your goal is to winnow out a few select sources, you might be better starting from scratch.
Now, open your newsreader application and look for the Import/Export feature – usually found under Settings or Preferences. Follow your newsreader’s instructions to import this file into the newsreader application. It won’t wipe out any existing subscriptions, just add these to yours.
One important tip . . .
Not only do OPML files make it easy to move from one newsreader to another, it also offers a way to share subscriptions with others. You can export your subscriptions and send your OPML file to others so they can then import them to their newsreader. Life is good.
