Rubenerd

People like my mum or Nagato Yuki would probably tell me books don’t have these problems. They’d be right!

Despite what some might consider my obsessive coverage of Google Reader over the last few months, I still have my Bloglines account and I continue to use it. I still much prefer the Bloglines interface to Google Reader; it does require a little JavaScript to work (a consideration for us NoScript users) but it’s behaviour is much more predictable owing to the fact it doesn’t use as much Ajax. After Google Reader’s latest interface upgrade, reading the feeds in my Bloglines account is even more of a relief.

ASIDE: Bloglines also has a beta interface which uses Ajax to the same extent as Google Reader. To say it smokes Google Reader might be a bit of an exaggeration, but they really have done an incredible job. If you don’t have people using one service over the other, I would really recommend it. I’ll be reviewing it in more detail in an up and coming post, when I have less homework!

As with most internet software though, often it comes down to the social aspect over something like the interface! All of my friends who share items are on Google Reader, so I use that for more general feeds with items I’m more likely to share. If I was really smart I’d merge their subscriptions and use one over the other… "if" being the operative word.

Or for example I’d subscribe to anime feeds (a topic I’m sure the WWR crew and Dave Wares on Reader would be bored to tears to read my shared items of!) in Bloglines, and things like sustainable living in Reader.

ASIDE: To Google Reader’s credit, they do publish people’s shared items in Atom feeds, which means I could still keep track of my friend’s shared items in Bloglines, it just means I wouldn’t be able to comment back. Unless they then subscribed to my Bloglines shared items instead, then they could see my comments and replies… hey that’d be cool, I might look into that.

On that train of thought, I’m thinking I might use the fact they’re separate services to my advantage. I might use Bloglines for economic news and for university related feeds for assignments and so forth, and use Google Reader for my downtime reading. That probably makes even more sense, even if that does mean Kelli and Atuu see perplexing posts about Nagato Yuki and unfortunate Code Geass silos full of tomatoes.

I have a post in the pipeline which I’ve been working on for weeks which talks about my problems with blog aggregators, but for now I’ll leave it at that.

Reading back this post I can’t discern what the point of it was. It started as a post comparing Google Reader and Bloglines, but then turned into something else. Hey, that would make a good post heading.

Perhaps I should do some more of that so called "thinking" stuff before I start penning such an aimless rambling of thoughts that is far too long for anyone to probably read in full. Come to think of it, "Rubenerd Rambling" sounds much catchier than the "Rubenerd Blog". It would certainly be a more accurate title. Hmm…