Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The end of an era

I've given up on Google Reader. I've had it on my iGoogle page for a long time and it's been very convenient to turn to when I want to catch up on all you lovely bloggers but it has one major flaw. You can't unsubscribe from anything.

Some time ago I decided to stop following Cake Wrecks and I unsubscribed in my Google Reader. A few days later Cake Wrecks was back with forty odd posts marked as unread. I deleted it from the reader. It came back. I unsubcribed in my Bloglist. It came back. I googled for a solution. There isn't one. Not one that works anyway.

So now I'm using BlogBridge. I'm hoping it will do what I tell it to and not decide for me that I really, really never want to unsubscribe from anything I've ever wanted to read in the past. Goodbye Google Reader!

11 COMMENTS:

Old Kitty said...

I have to admit, I've never really used google reader!! Wouldn't know how to! LOL!

Glad you got an alternative though - that must have been so annoying when you thought you've unsubscribed and Google reader decides that you haven't! Kafkaesque is the word that comes to mind!

take care
x

Simon Kewin said...

Oh no! I've just started using Google Reader after using a different reader all this time!

I'd really like to know how you get on with BlogBridge ...

iasa said...

With google reader it is really annoying that if you choose the 'follow' option on a blog you have to visit the blog and stop following at the site.

fairyhedgehog said...

Kitty, I don't know how I'd manage without a blog reader! I'd never know when a new post was up!

Simon, BlogBridge means you can sort your feeds by lists - so I can see friends and science blogs separately! It does mean I have to click to mark as read but sometimes that's a plus. The only real minus so far is that there's no horizontal scroll so I have to click through to read cartoons.

What reader were you using and how did it compare?

iasa, I tried going to the websites to stop following but even that didn't seem to work permanently! It's like they go back to an earlier version of the list from time to time! As Kitty said, it felt Kafkaesque.

Quirky Jessi said...

Weird, I unsubscribe from sites all the time and have never had a problem. Then again, I use Google Reader directly on the Google Reader site and not on iGoogle. Did you maybe try unsubscribing from the main GR site instead? This is the first time I've heard anyone have issues unsubscribing, yikes!

jjdebenedictis said...

That's so weird; like Quirky Jessi, I've never had trouble with unsubscribing to a blog in Google Reader. I, too, use it on the Google site, and I always copy/paste the websites in rather than clicking anyone's widget. I wonder why it's so variable?

fairyhedgehog said...

Jessi, I might just give it a go unsubscribing from the main site. If I can find it! Although I'm rather liking the way I can sort feeds in BlogBridge.

jj, it's possible that the cut and paste is the answer. In the past I've mostly clicked on a Followers widget so that people can see I'm following even if I don't comment. I have no idea how that would work with BlogBridge though.

Whirlochre said...

I think there's a knack to unsubscibing to things on Google Reader — a bit like avoiding kissing someone during a 20-person game of Twister.

I'm sticking with it because it's part of a one-stop shop for mail, maps, docs etc. I tried Snarfer but found i was doubling up too often with Reader.

Point is — you need some sort of assembly point for your curiosynap flings, don't you?

fairyhedgehog said...

Whirl, I wonder if part of the problem is that CakeWrecks doesn't now have a follower widget to unsubscribe with. Anyway, BlogBridge is doing the job splendidly so far.

Simon Kewin said...

I was using RSSBandit, which was pretty good but is an offline reader so I lost track of what I'd already read when I used it on a differnet machine. That was why I switched to a web-based one really. It also lost all my feeds twice, which is never good.

I'm liking Google Reader. I'm using the Tags think to group the blogs I read and that seems to work nicely for me.

fairyhedgehog said...

Simon, luckily BlogBridge synchronises online so I should be able to use in on another machine. Not that that's an issue at the moment. I never tried using tags in Google Reader.

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