I had always known about RSS feeds and social bookmarking but have never felt the need to subscribe to a feed or participate in social bookmarking. As with RSS feeds I always felt that by bookmarking a website on my bookmark tool bar I would be able to click and choose to see when or if the page I'm interested in had been updated. The idea of a barrage of updates feeding into my browser had me a little uncomfortable at first. Perhaps it's the way I choose to absorb my information, one news feed at a time in the same website.
Screen shot of Google Reader
With Google Reader being discontinued from the 1st of July 2013, websites like Wired.com have stopped offering feeds via Google Reader. Instead they have provided the options of:
FeedDemon
NetNewsWire
NewsFire
News Gator (Outlook edition)
RSS Owl
Shrook
USM
(Screen shot of The Old Reader website and description.)
I opted for The Old Reader a web based RSS reader which allowed me to import all my Google Reader subscriptions into their service using Google Reader's export settings.
(Screen shot of Google Reader's Takeout service, an export function which packages your 'likes' 'following' 'followers'and most importantly subscriptions as an xml file all in one zipped folder.)
Having set-up a list of subscriptions I now have a barrage of information coming my way and ready to read from any workstation (provided there is an internet connection available.)
(screen shot of old reader feeds)
Social bookmarking isn't a concept I'm particularly interested in. With my email and a Twitter account the idea of sharing a link to hundreds and thousands of people makes me uncomfortable. Del.cio.us on the other hand is a handy tool for storing your bookmarks throughout the web. Having two workstations, one a laptop and a desktop, I had been trying to synchronise my bookmarks in Mozilla's Firefox for each machine. The added plugin in Firefox looked promising however it proved to be unreliable in synchronisation. Delicious which I had tested out in 2011 was a good solution to my problem. I soon found out they had changed the interface and added more features I did not find necessary. I was able to revert to the old delicious by using the 'previous' function. eg:
http://previous.delicious.com
(screen shot of previous delicious)
And was now able to access my bookmarks on the go. It;s particularly handy as many websites have embeded widgets which allow for quick linking to your delicious account.
Hi Ed,
ReplyDeleteI too was a little skeptical at first about social bookmarking sites such as Delicious, but I can appreciate their purpose within a Web 2.0 context, what with its ease of access and storage capabilities. By the way, I didn't realise there was an earlier version of Delicious, I may have to check it out and compare it with its newer counterpart - thanks for the insight.