With the demise of Google Reader lots of users seem to have given up on RSS. Which is a shame as it’s still the fastest, most efficient way to keep up with lots of news sources. There’s a new breed of free news readers that are as good or better than Goggle Reader ever was. Here are five that work on the desktop and in at least some mobile browsers. The readers were tested for cross-browser support in desktop Firefox … Continue reading
In this age of Twitter I’m finding I use RSS a lot less than I used to. Most of the bloggers and sites I used to read in my RSS reader are active on Twitter and they always Tweet a link to their latest post. But I still use RSS, particularly to follow web forums and mailing lists. People who post to forums and lists don’t usually tweet about it, but many forums including the My Opera Forums and Forum … Continue reading
I love what Google is doing for mobile; pushing the limits of device and OS capabilities with Android, championing HTML5 and the Web as the future of mobile applications and adopting a “mobile first” philosophy where new services are rolled out before or at the same time as their desktop counterparts. But I do have a bone to pick with the way one of Google most popular web services, Google Reader, works on mobile. I really wish I could use … Continue reading
I got an email from Ivan at Wattpad.com announcing his new mobile service, FeedM8. What it does is create a mobile site from an RSS feed. There are other services that do this. But the only ones I can recommend are Mowser (review), Winksite (review) and now FeedM8. I like these three because they are the only ones of the dozen or so I’ve tried that split long posts into mobile sized chunks and deliver clean and valid markup that … Continue reading
I read RSS feeds on my phone and on the web – a lot. I’ve never been 100% happy with any of the mobile web news readers. I’ve been been using Bloglines forever even though it has three “features” that I find really annoying. The worst is that Bloglines Mobile’s style sheet changes all links to black, the same as plain text. Opera Mini doesn’t underline links so I miss following a lot of interesting links because I never see … Continue reading
News Alloy is a two and a half year old web based RSS feed reader that rivals market leaders Bloglines and Google Reader in features – and it has a mobile web version (pda.newsalloy.com). News Alloy on the PC is very similar to Google Reader. It’s a two column design with the feed list on the left and posts on the right. The default is to show all items from all feeds with most recent ones first, the “River of … Continue reading
Do you browse the mobile web while riding on public transit? I do most of my mobile web browsing and also catch up with email during my hour long daily commute on the BART train. I see a lot of other people doing the same thing on my train. And that’s in spite of the fact that about half of that time the train is in tunnels where there is no cellular reception. I used to wish I could download … Continue reading
Six months ago I posted a piece entitled All I want is a good WAP RSS Reader comparing all the mobile web based rss aggregators that I could find at that time. Last week Google released a mobile version of their Reader. Here’s my take on the latest entrant in mobile feed reading wars. First of all, the main advantage that web based aggregators have is that they maintain the state of your feed reading experience across devices. If you … Continue reading