Long Live Reading

With Google Reader now buried, and
my preferred reading app NewsRob with it, I figured I’d share how things shook out in my quest to keep reading…

My targets:

  • content-focused web app, keyboard navigable, and somehow able to theme it dark (y’know, light the content, not the room 🙂
  • responsive mobile app with good caching, plugin support, and also dark-skinnable

On the web service side, I tried and found:

  • Yoleo – ok, but strange UI, and no mobile app!
  • The Old Reader – UI similar to Reader, but much too basic and slow
  • CommaFeed – almost perfect clone of Reader’s UI, and great features (including custom theming), but somewhat slow
  • NewsBlur – fast UI, but focused on its own slickness, and bad keyboard accessibility
  • Feedly – (originally NO web client, but they made one for Reader fans!) – fast UI, but missing +/- to zoom text.

For mobile apps, I tried:

  • CommaFeed – too little/late. Alpha released 2 days before Reader buried, and didn’t even have caching.
  • Feedly – too dog slow to be at all usable.
  • GReader – very sophisticated (and better performance than my previous try a year ago)

My friend Sean McCabe (who really needs a blog!) enlightened me that GReader supported Feedly, and that Feedly also imported Reader’s Starred Items. I have 6 years of Starred Items that I didn’t want to use, so that sealed the deal: Feedly+GReader it is!

Feedly’s only cons: missing +/- zoom, and themes only cover navbar — I figured I can handle that… But I just remembered the Chrome extension Stylebot, which can inject your own custom CSS into any page. I’ve just used it to create a black AND zoomed theme for Feedly. Perfecto.

Keep on reading!

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