For awhile I was a blogging junkie. Reading all night, all morning, and even in the afternoons on my way home from work. It came about when I discovered Bloglines. The service, for those who are unfamiliar, allows you to read blogs from one central location: on the web. Google Reader does pretty much the same thing. Both have been around for awhile now.
How Blog Readers Work
Blogs are simple websites with postings organized by date. Some people visit them by typing in web addresses or searching around the Internet to find them. People who really use them get a Reader. You can have a reader on your desktop but I think they are more commonly used online.
Setup is easy. Configure your desktop client, or better yet, sign up for one of the free services and login. You then can set your default RSS/XML service in Firefox's settings.
When you find a blog you like while randomly surfing online you probably see a lot of RSS and/or XML links you can click. Those mean something to you now. If you have a blog reader setup you will have the option of adding the new blog to your feed listing by clicking that link. Upon doing so you are subscribed.
How Bloglines and Google Reader Compare
Bloglines is a feed reader which easily integrates into Firefox, the web browser I use on a daily basis for it's web developer features. You can put things into categories and read by category rather than individually by blog. You can save entries for later. You can even choose to use their new interface or continue using the original. They have impressive support of legacy products if nothing else.
The shortcomings of the classic interface are many. International character support is lacking. I have had troubles creating folders en français because that little ç character is sometimes in Unicode formatting and sometimes not. That is a much bigger issue than it seems: it means that some pages will always look broken no matter what. That is frustrating.
The other issue is with the "saved items". After awhile these start to pile up. When you load feeds it loads all of the saved items from the feed every single time. That means after awhile of reading Engadget you will suddenly be thinking about how many megabytes each listing of stories will become.
And that, my friends, is what I was thinking when I switched to Google Reader.
Google Reader
As a test, I thought my browser might improve it's performance if I moved over. Why? Google has a pretty good history of doing Javascript better than other companies. Javascript is a huge part of blog reader web software right now.
Another component to that was loading of too much content at once. I'm not sure how Google manages this*
Categorization is different. Layout is different as well. I will probably like it more over time. Keyboard support - h- j - k - l - is a lot better than with Bloglines.
