Saturday, September 30, 2006

[RSS] google breaks my heart

Usually I am excited about new software updates because they ordinarily represent an understandable improvement and flow. I pick up new ideas quickly, and am fast to grasp better methodologys.

Google's new reader upgrade from two days ago has stopped me in my tracks. I havent been able to read any blogs in the last couple of days because their darned new reader has flumoxed me so.

My main gripe is that is is really slow! Sometimes it takes a couple of seconds to get from one blog post to the next when it used to be instantaneous. And I keep getting an error window popping up that says some script has 'stopped running - should I end it now'. I never got that before. It is very irritating.



When I go to its 'Home Page' it shows up 'What's New' it awlays shows the same three blogs every time i visit. I know its not always those three blogs that are the newest. it is bizarre and a waste of space.

Luckily Joy advised me to switch it to using it the old-fashioned way, so hopefully I will be able to catch up a little on my reading.

But really I was hoping I would simply 'get' what google was trying to do with this change. I am really going to have to play with it hard to try and understand the direction they are heading. It certainly didn't align with my own brain this time.

I would have been happy if they had just put a search function in there. That would have been the most useful change I could have thought of.


Anyone else loving it, have some tips for how I can learn to love it too?


*ADDITION SUNDAY OCT 1st:*
I have been playng with it and I love it even less...

Now, at the time when you add a subscription you are no longer invited to "add labels"This is a step backwards in functionality. I have over 800 feeds and unless I add the necessary labels at that point in time, when I actually subscribe, then I have to go and find that blog i just added and give it a label after the fact. This is way too much work for me. This factor alone is enough to make me want to switch back to the old version. I used to love that the labels had little drop downs so you could pick from previously used labels. Why have these disappeared?

OK - so now I am migrating back to the old version forthwith.

This Post was written by sam from Becks & Posh

5 comments:

Sam said...

so here is somethingi have just discovered (you can tell I am trying to get to know this new software better:

Google Reader labs-> Settings ->Goodies->

You can add a "next " button to your tool bar which will oad through the blogs in your rss one at a time, oading each page.

You can set this for a specific tag if you prefer.

For this you obviously have to wait for thepage to load but it is quite novel to see your reads as their writer intended, in the contxt of a web page, instead of in a feed format.

There is also another button for adding to your RSS.

Bonnie said...

I too loaded up the new reader software, but it was completely doing my head in. It was so not obviously ready for Safari yet as the pages were loading up completely wrong. It had me completely stumped. Even to the point where I couldn't work out what to press, or what was even going on.

Needless to say, I quickly switched back to the current standard format. Fortunately, I have a Google Reader feed on my Google Homepage and I can read all of my feeds from the Google Homepage rather from the Google Reader Homepage, so my reading wasn't affected.

Hopefully they'll be able to sort out the problems - but it seems they brought this new format to press too quickly.

Anupama said...

Thanx for dropping by at my blog.

Dolores said...

Count me among the confused -- trying to figure out what direction they're taking the Google reader in. One of the things I loved about the original version (which I've converted back to while I can) was the simplicity of the whole thing. Why does "upgrade" so often mean "complicate?"

kitchenmage said...

Heh, you know you've been doing technical writing way too long when your first response is to go look at the page to see if you can explain it. And I think I could, but why bother?

There is an easy way to go back to the old style, no? So you should, because if the "upgrade" doesn't make it easier, it's not much of an upgrade.

but I *think* the Google deal is that the "home" display is the three newest posts from the most recently updated blog on each of your lists...or some of your lists, probably the ones with the most recent updates. Which only explains one small part of it, but maybe it helps with that piece of the mystery. :-)