RSS Feeds, Ubuntu and Google Reader
I’ve spent a few hours tonight setting up Google Reader with feeds for all the sites I visit on a regular basis.
A large bulk of my time during the day is visiting a whole bunch of sites and scouring them for stuff that interests me, I used to have a few site’s feeds as Firefox Live Bookmarks but I outgrew the toolbar space available which made using them a bit of a chore.
I finally decided to take a look at using a dedicated feed reader to try to speed up my “geeky news assimilation time” (or GNAT 
).
As I use Ubuntu exclusively now I started looking at feed readers in the Ubuntu repositories. I’d heard of Liferea and as it’s a GTK+ application it fits into the Gnome desktop nicely. I also tried Straw (which is also a Gnome application) and Akregator which is a KDE application.
All three of these were good although both Akregator and Liferea easily beat out Straw for features. If all you want is a simple feed reader though Straw is the way to go.
To try these on Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) do the following:
sudo apt-get install straw liferea akregatorTo remove them use:
sudo apt-get remove straw liferea akregatorObviously omit ones you want to keep! To remove dependencies that removing packages might leave behind simply do:
sudo apt-get autoremove
None of these really satisfied me though, so I took a look at Google Reader. I’d already looked at it briefly when it originally appeared but at that point I was still coping with Live Bookmarks. The main reason I decided to look again was after seeing this video where Robert Scoble talks about how he uses Google Reader to browse 622 feeds!!!
I didn’t realise that Google Reader has keyboard shortcuts, they make skim-reading feeds so much quicker than any of the desktop feed readers I tried. Google Reader is also MUCH quicker for me than any of the desktop feed readers which is also a huge bonus.
I only have 50 feeds that I browse (which compared to 622 is miniscule) but so far Google Reader is definitely helping to speed up my GNAT which leaves more time for me to procrastinate over my procrastination of projects I kind of semi-start.
So if you visit a lot of sites and have never thought about using a feed reader, give Google Reader a try, it’s really simple to use and fast.
Tags: google reader, linux
