Bye Bye Google Reader

I won't miss you. Why? Well, because I never used you.

I read a lot of Blogs. I read a lot of commercial RSS feeds. Basically I'm an information junkie. But my tastes run to a lot of different topics. Firstly there is all the Domino Developers that I follow. My technical news sources. My Security feeds. Allotment and Green technologies, and a whole load of other things like the weather, XKCD, Girl Genius, Dilbert, and Flickr images. I get all this in one place.

But I don't want it all dumped on me at once. I like to browse through it all. Some news sources have a minimal single line summary, so those feeds I have to go to their website to get the info. Others offer full rich text and images as their feed. Some are simply an image or collection of images.

Google Reader is all well and good. It's fast and simple. But it doesn't offer the flexibility I want. That's why I use Netvibes.

Netvibes allows me to set up separate pages. I have a Domino page, a general Web Development page, Flickr feeds and ... well you can see from this.

Each page can have it's own options. Each feed can also have it's own config and display properties. I find it very flexible and ideally suited to my needs.

Want to give it a try with all your Google Reader data then follow these steps.

• Log in to Google Takeout
• Click on "Create archive" to export your subscriptions as a ZIP file
• Unzip the saved file
• Go to Netvibes, click on "Add content" then "OPML: Import", "Choose File" and select the "subscriptions.XML" file you just unzipped
• Click on "Import"

Now all you need to do is start shifting things around to suit your needs. Have fun...