google-reader on S Anand

Goodbye Google

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 12:29:25 +0000

Google Reader was where I spent most of my browsing time, but now, it’s shutting down.

Time for alternatives, but not just for Reader: for all Google products. I’m not sure when one of these might go down, become paid, or become unusable.

I just uninstalled Google Drive and Google Talk. but I don’t use it much (I use Skype), so no loss. I’ll leave Chrome for the while, but I’m hearing reports that Firefox is improving faster than Chrome is. Or there’s Chromium.

I’m not worried much about search services (including image, video, scholar and books). When needed, I can switch. Scholar might be a bit sad to lose, but I don’t use it much. Google Translate, too, isn’t essential.

Likewise for content. YouTube’s not a problem. There’re enough other video services. Trends are useful, but not critical. Maps might be, so I’ll try and switch to OpenStreetMap. I don’t use News or Picasa much.

I don’t care much for social media anyway, so Blogger, Orkut and Plus can die any time.

Google’s apps are the worrying ones. Mail and Calendar, in particular. I’ll probably migrate away from them last, but the attempt is on. I’ll be documenting the alternatives I find at https://gist.github.com/sanand0/5176161 (safely cloned locally).

Looks like there’s no safe long-term alternative to being able to host your own apps. Pity.

Comments

Hari K T 20 Mar 2013 12:23 pm: You are right. Probably many of them will follow your path :-) .
Dan Murray 16 Mar 2013 2:01 pm: It is annoying…isn’t it.
Ravikumar Venkateswar 18 Mar 2013 6:33 pm: Reader’s the one that bugs me the most, since they basically out-competed all of the alternatives, even the paid ones. I prefer paid apps, personally, because I know where the money’s coming from, and there’s less chance that they’d make them unusable. I switched from Picasa to Smugmug a while ago, and I’m probably going to move Mail and Calendar to free Google Apps or maybe my employer’s service. Why would you host your own apps instead of paying directly?
Hosting options | s-anand.net 1 Jun 2013 6:49 am (pingback): […] means. I can’t just take that code and move it to another server. Besides, I’m a bit wary of Google pulling the plug. Heroku? Same problem. I just want to take the code elsewhere and run […]
Tarun 21 Mar 2013 11:44 am: What about the appengine, did you explore any alternatives for it? I was quite impressed with script.google.com also, its in-line with your style of coding .
Dev E 22 Mar 2013 3:22 am: How about Nokia’s here.com for maps?
Mathew 23 Mar 2013 12:38 am: Feedly if you plan to keep Chrome.
Om Shankar 16 Jul 2013 11:35 am: Dude. I seriously hope you were saying that all out of anger and they are not your actual insights of other Google products. (Some were ridiculous - like Maps, Gmail, +plus, Chrome, etc.) Coz, if it were, you definitely need to come back to internet in today’s age and have a check again on your updates. Looking forward to your conf. at Bangalore JS. :-)

Managing feed overload

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 12:00:00 +0000

I have only two problems with Google Reader.

The first is that it doesn’t support authenticated feeds. Ideally, I’d have liked to have a single reading list that combines my e-mail with newsfeeds. GMail offers RSS feeds of your e-mail. But the feeds require authentication (obviously) and Google Reader doesn’t support that right now. (So I usually don’t read e-mail :-)

The second is that it’s tough to manage large feeds. It’s a personal quirk, really. I like to read all entries. If there are 100, I read all 100. If there are 1000, I struggle but read all 1000. I’m too scared to “Mark all read” because there are some sources that I don’t want to miss.

The 80-20 rule is at work here. There are some prolific writers (like Scoble) who write many entries a day. There are some prolific sources (del.icio.us or digg). I can’t keep up with such writers / sources. I don’t particularly want to. If I missed one day of del.icio.us popular items, I’ll just read the next day’s.

With Google Reader, that makes me uneasy. I don’t like having 200 unread items. I don’t like to mark them all read.

In such cases, popurls’ approach is useful. It shows the top 15-30 entries of the popular sites as a snapshot. Any time you’re short of things to read, visit this. If you’re busy, don’t.

Using Google’s AJAX Feed API, it’s quite trivial to build your own feed reader. So I cloned popurls’ layout into my bookmarks page, and put in feeds that I like.

You can customise my bookmarks page to use your own feeds. Save the page, open it in Notepad, and look for existing feeds. They’ll look like this:

"hacker news" : {
    entries:15,
    url:"http://news.ycombinator.com/rss"
},

The first line (“hacker news”) is the title of the feed. You can call it what you want. Set entries to the number of feed entries you want to show. Set url to the RSS feed URL. Save it, and you have your own feed reader. (If you want to put it up on your site, you may want to change the Google API key.)

Try it! Just save this page and edit the feeds.

Here, I must point out three things about Google’s AJAX Feed API that make it extremely powerful.

The obvious is that is allows Javascript access to RSS in a very easy way. That makes it very easy to integrate with any web page.

The second is subtler – it includes historical entries. So even if an RSS feed had only 10 entries, I could pick up the last 100 or 1,000, as long as Google has known about the feed for long enough. This is what makes Google Reader more of a platform rather than a simple feed reader application. Google Reader is a feed archiver – not just a feed reader.

The third (I’m a bit crazy here) is that you can use it to schedule tasks. Google’s FeedFetcher refreshes feeds every 3 hours or so. If you want to do something every three hours (or some multiple thereof – say every 24 hours), you can write a program that does what you want, and subscribe to it’s output as a feed.

You may notice that I have a Referrers to s-anand.net on my bookmarks page. These are the sites that someone clicked on to visit my site. I have a PHP application that searches my access log for external referrers. Rather than visit that page every time, I just made an RSS feed out of it and subscribed to it. Every three hours or so, Google accesses the URL. I search my access.log and archives the latest results. So, even after my access.log is trimmed by the server, I have it all on Google Reader to catch up with later.

Since Google doesn’t forget to ping, I can schedule some fairly time-critical processes this way. For instance, if I wanted to download each Dilbert strip, every day as it arrives, I can create an application that downloads the file and returns a feed entry. Now, I don’t need to remember to run it every day! I just subscribe to the application on Google Reader, and Google will remind the application to run every 3 hours. (I know – I could use a crontab, but somehow, I like this.) Plus I would get the Dilbert strip on my feed reader as a bonus.

Update: Google has just released PartnerBar, which is a more flexible way of viewing a snapshot of feeds.

Advanced Google Reader

Sun, 16 Dec 2007 12:00:00 +0000

I’ve stopped visiting websites.

No, really. There’s only one website I visit these days. Google Reader.

Google Reader is a feed reader. If you want to just catch up on the new stuff on a site, you can add the site to Google Reader. Anything new that is published on the site appears in Google Reader. Right now, I’ve subscribed to over 50 feeds. There’s no way I can remember to visit 50 sites – so I’m actually able to read more and miss less.

In a sense, that’s the essence of using feeds to read stuff: remember less, read more and miss less. If I ever find an interesting site, I just add it to Google Reader and forget about it.

But it goes beyond that. You can subscribe to search results.

Videos, for examples. Subscribe to a search for google engedu on Google Video. Any new TechTalk at Google, you get it in your Reader. (The talks are fabulous by the way.) Or search for hindi movies.

Photos? Track new photos of the Indian cricket team on Flickr.

Movies? Get an update of the latest movie torrents from mininova or torrentspy. Or just get updates on American Gangster DVDRip.

Presentations? Track anything on Javascript or consulting from SlideShare.

Documents? Find new eBooks on Scribd.

Not all pages offer a feed. But Page2Rss offers a reasonable solution. It converts pretty much any page into a feed.

It’s gotten to the point where anything I know I want to read, I put it on Google Reader. The rest of the Internet is when I don’t know what I want to read.

Comments

Jayan 16 Dec 2007 12:00 pm: Same here. I ve been using it for over 2 months now. I subscribe to over 200 feeds. This reader is coool.. - (http://ekalayva.wordpress.com)
Simon32 16 Dec 2007 12:00 pm: I agree, RSS is great! Btw, you might also want to checkout Feedity - www.feedity.com for creating free custom RSS feeds.

Google Reader shared lists are tough to find

Tue, 16 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Though Google Reader learns to share, I haven’t found it easy to see what others are reading. Even a Google search for shared lists reveals very few.

Google Feed API

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google Feed API to be released soon. While on Google, there’s some rumour about Google Purchases being used for video rentals – and eventually on to micropayments, competing with Paypal. Also, William Slawski maps Google’s acquisitions.

Comments

Ashwin 1 Jan 2006 3:13 pm: Anand, you have a similar look of Prasanna. (Hero of Tamil film: Kanda Naal Mudhal)
S Anand 2 Jan 2006 11:25 am: Gosh, thanks! :-)

Windows Live Local

Thu, 08 Dec 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Windows Live Local tries to match Google Maps. But Google Maps is just too fast. As I mentioned earlier (Why Google Reader): the reason I like Google is largely speed.>

Why Google Reader

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0000

I switched to Google Reader as my blog reader (I was using Mozilla so far). The reason was simple: speed. Thanks to the Google site’s speed and keyboard navigation, I can read blog entries 10 times faster. Now there’s a unique proposition for Google that a lot of people are missing: that their site loads a whole lot faster than others. It makes a huge difference to the whole browsing experience.

Comments

Dhar 24 Oct 2005 9:38 am: Anand, check out Groovy.
Dhar 24 Oct 2005 9:38 am: Sorry, it should be Goowy
S Anand 24 Oct 2005 2:26 pm: Quite an app!

Google Reader

Sun, 09 Oct 2005 12:00:00 +0000

Google Reader. Gmail principles applied to RSS. You can subscribe to posts, label feeds and star RSS items. The reader suggests items from your subscriptions based on your interest.