How much do you rely on your feed reader?
Like a lot of bloggers, I check my RSS feed reader regularly. I use it to keep up to date with what’s happening in the blogging world, to keep up to date on the latest gadgets and games and I also subscribe to some sports and entertainment blogs. In total I subscribe to about 75 blogs.
I logged into my NetVibes account today to see that all my feeds were gone. All the category tabs I had set up were still there however the feeds were gone. It’s probably just a temporary problem (hopefully) however it did make me realise how much I rely on my news reader, both for blogging and for reading my favourite websites. One of the slogans Netvibes uses is ‘Save 30 minutes of your internet time every day‘, which I believe is true of all RSS feed readers.
No doubt about it, the number of hours I work on the internet everyday would drastically increase if I didn’t use my feed reader. I know not all bloggers use feed readers regularly, infact, many admit to not reading other blogs at all. I guess it depends on what information you want and how you want it filtered to you.
How much do you rely on your feed reader? Is it a vital part of your blogging routine or does it just make checking your favourite blogs a little bit easier?
Written by Kevin Muldoon from Blog Themes ClubPosted on January 11th, 2009 and filed under Blogging
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21 Responses to “How much do you rely on your feed reader?”
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Can’t say my feed reader has much to do with my blogging. I do not read feeds because I blog, I do because it’s stuff I want (need) to read.
By the way exporting list of feeds to OPML from time to time is good idea. I don’t have it automated like other backups but do occasionally.
Some feeds I check because of blogging i.e. news etc, but many others I check for leisure. I could just check those websites directly to read the content and sometimes do so that I can leave a comment however a feed reader makes it much easier to not only read the latest posts, but see which blogs/websites have updated recently.
I’m an RSS junkie. I subscribe to well over 200 feeds. News, Sports, Friends’ activity, Stats and Metrics on things, you name it.
Google Reader went down for a few hours a couple weeks ago and I was lost. I still have my old bloglines account. I think I’m going to periodically export my OPML feed from Google and Import it into Bloglines as a fail-safe.
Kevin I hear you.
Thats why I have multiple backup of my feeds. On my pc I have FeedDemon on the web I have Google Reader, bloglines & My Yahoo.
So if either of them gives me any trouble I can easily switch to a close alternative.
Its very easy to export the feeds in a file as a backup and you can import it anywhere.
Same here Kevin, I use Newsgator Feed Demon and Google Reader. My primary reader is Feed Demon. Google Reader serves as backup.
I read about 45-46 feeds, 20 out of them are tech blogs. Daily about 45 minutes are spent on these feeds. So it averages to 1 minute/feed.
I must admit I don’t rely on a feedreader as such. It makes life easier to keep up with everything, however I only check through it when I have the time, which can sometimes be a gap of a couple of weeks. I subscribe to photo feeds off Flickr, along with friend’s websites. I don’t use it to help my own blogging, just merely to keep up with everyone’s sites.
I switched to Feed Demon recently (newsgator online) from Google Reader, so luckily I have a backup on Google for most of the sites besides a couple I’ve added since, however it’s never occured to me what would happen if all my subscriptions were deleted off my reader!
I use my feed reader to follow just about everything from Forums, to blogs, to news, to Yahoo Answers. If a venue does not offer an RSS feed I lose interest. It is how I stay engaged on the web.
At first I though Feeds weren’t useful at all. Now I have changed my mind. It’s a fast and easy way to stay tuned and find easily what interests me.
I cant live without my RSS reader. It is the only real way to keep up-to-date with all your favourite websites in one simple location.
After reading this, I am now setting up a back up reader!!! I really HEAVILY on my rss reader. Currently I have over 350 subscriptions for a wide variety of news, blogs, and Google Alerts.
If I lost these, I’m not sure if I could possible find all the feeds again. Especially some of the lesser little know blogs that I find so interesting.
I sign up to get postings via my email for sites, like this one, where I want information, especially about blogging. I then can quickly scan through my email to see if I want to go to the Blog too which in most cases I do. I also subscribe to a number of Goggle messages about various subjects I’m interested in and find that very useful.
Would die without it. In fact there are many sites I don’t read because they don’t / didn’t offer feeds.
How can they!!
I’d be lost without my feed reader and you’ve just reminded me that I haven’t backed up my feeds in a long time. I use Google Reader and subscribe to about 150 feeds. I just might cry if I lost all of them lol.
I rely heavily on my rss reader. It obviously makes it easy to keep up-to-date on my favorite blogs but I am subscribed to ton of random blogs that I check up on once in awhile. I probably spend at least 2hrs a day in google reader, reading posts then clicking through to comment on interesting ones.
I have a backup from a few months ago as I used it to transfer my feeds to googles ireader. However, I don’t have a recent one and my netvibes account is still not showing any feeds. Eek!!
I also have a Netvibes account and I know for sure you can back up all your data in Netvibes.
There is some setting in Netvibes that allows you do this, however I cant tell you exactly where it is straight out of my head, I would reccomend anyone using Netvibes or any other RSS service to back up the feeds, they take minimum space, its quick and easy to do and will give you peace of mind.
I don’t rely on my feed reader too much more these days. It’s great, don’t get me wrong, but the best content that I find is via Friendfeed, Twitter, or someone’s blog that I probably found via one of those services.
I’ve definitely started branching out. To be honest, my feed reader is getting boring.
I lost all of my feeds when reddit’s feedreader went down a couple of years ago, and never got them back. At the time it was devastating, but I never did fully re-build the list, because once I got out of the habit of obsessively checking the reader, I realized I’d been wasting a lot of time skimming 100’s of headlines, instead of reading a few quality articles/posts per day.
I love reading feeds so much I built my own web based feed reader to help handle my overload. I also started to play with ways to integrate twitter and friendfeed into it.