Bye-bye, Google Reader: Alternative RSS solutions for Mac and iOS users | Macworld [feedly]

Bye-bye, Google Reader: Alternative RSS solutions for Mac and iOS users | Macworld

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Save Google Reader RSS feeds

With the unfortunate demise of google's RSS application it might be time to start getting ready to migrate to something else.  I use RSS frequently and will certainly miss my current setup.
MacOSXHints.comSave Google Reader RSS feeds

You may have seen the news that Google Reader is shutting down as of July 1, 2013. If you use Google Reader, you may want to save your feeds to be able to import them into another RSS reader.

Go to Google Reader, then click on the gear icon at the right of the page and choose Settings. Click in Import/Export. In the Export your information section, click on Download your data through Takeout. Follow the instructions to download your data.

When you download the data, you'll get a ZIP archive. Double-click it, and look in the Reader folder for a subscriptions.xml file. You can use that to import your feeds into other RSS readers.


http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20130314062131852

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Don't Let RSS Die!!!

I know it's a relatively small portion of the population that uses RSS but for those of you who don't use it, it's worth a look and for those who do, plead to your browser creator and remind them that you use it!  There are countless ways its useful and some of those are in the much more eloquent blog post here.

Viewing RSS

As you may already know, I'm a big fan of RSS for many purposes but most particularly, for getting updates on articles I'm interested in. It's a powerful tool and is pretty elegant. I've been using the native RSS reader in my web browser for the last few years but it's become kind of buggy lately and the discussion boards have various theories and quasi-solutions for fixing it. The issue is that the browser feeds seem to quit auto-refereshing after I've been logged in for a while or they'll show that there's a new article and there isn't. I've also found my bookmark list to be getting overly complicated. So I'm delving back into using a dedicated news reader. I'm trying out NetNewsWire, which is now free. It's a little easier to organize my bookmarks but the killer feature with it is that it uses the NewsGator service (which is free) to synchronize your RSS feed lists. It also has a web interface and a mobile web interface designed specifically for the iPhone/iPod Touch. I'm only into it a day but so far so good.

New fangled RSS thingie?

Most of the technology friends I have know that I've been espousing the virtues of RSS like Don Quixote and with about as much success.

I guess I was an early adopter of RSS and that was just for getting news content. RSS is the backbone of other technologies too, such as podcasting and photocasting which is an RSS feed with photos. The appropriate program can subscribe to the feed and display the photos on your computer and notify you when there are updates, some programs elegantly integrate them in with your own photos, such as Apple's iPhoto.

When coders first started delivering RSS feeds there wasn't really an elegant way of delivering the content to your average or casual computer user other than adding another program. Last year Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7 to the masses and finally, all the major browsers would support RSS feeds natively. Prior to IE7 for the Windows users you had to use Firefox as your browser (and their implementation of RSS wasn't very elegant) or a third-party program for subscribing to and viewing feeds.

According to my theory on how your average person (and they will be dinosaurs before long) uses a computer, a third program for regular viewing is just too much to handle. Your average dinosaur uses e-mail and web, anything beyond the first two is something used for work, a chore, or a project, such as Word or Excel or Photoshop Elements.

So, now we have a situation where the excitement about RSS has worn thin just because the people who dig it have been using it for a long time and it's commonplace OR others tried it with a 3rd party viewer and it was too clunky for the majority of them and they haven't re-visited it. Outlook 2007 for Windows did add the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds in the mail application, which is surprising because I would have expected Apple to introduce it first, although it should be included with Leopard 10.5 operating system sometime in October 2007.

I am still an avid RSS user, I love getting my news updates as headlines + 2 sentences and I can readily click on the rest that I want to read. For me it's really the closest thing to being able to skim the newspaper or a magazine and then delve into the articles that interest me. I have collections of feeds in folders in my browser, such as 'IT', 'Industry', 'Local News', and several others. Whenever there is a new article a little number indicating the number of articles shows up next to the folder and I can click on it and check them out. It's incredibly convenient and keeps me up to speed on most of the news that interests me.

I've tried to explain how it can make you productive to lots of techie and non-techie friends but I'm running out of breath so it'll be my thing for now.

Job Search Ideas

So I'm trying out some of the new sites that might, in theory, help me identify and/or be identified for finding a good match for a new position.

Over the past year or so a few of my friends, former work-mates, and fellow MBA cohort friends have asked me to be a part of their LinkedIn networks.  I always accepted but now in surfing around on LinkedIn it could have more potential than I might originally have thought.  I have now updated my LinkedIn profile, added a button on this blog to it (see the right-hand column).

Another job identifying site that looks interesting is JobFox.  It's a little different than the more traditional HotJobs/Monster/CareerBuilder sites in that it creates a map of your skills based upon a series of questions.  It allows some personalization and is a welcome change from the usual sites.  There's a link to my JobFox profile at the bottom of this page.

Most of my technology friends won't be surprised by this but I'm using RSS feeds whenever possible to get updates to new positions.  Craigslist doesn't appear to support Boolean searches so I have several RSS feeds per locale but it does all aggregate nicely into a single button in my browser.  It's a fairly elegant way to get frequent updates.  Unfortunately not all sites support RSS yet so I still depend also on the e-mail notifications and periodic web site visits.  I still have to get my HotJobs & Monster searches dialed in since they seem to return a lot of unrelated results.

I wouldn't say that I have a distinct favorite job search site but so far RSS is the leader for finding jobs, IMHO.