Monday, March 7, 2011

Google Blog Reader Problems

I lean on Google's "Blog Reader" function quite heavily to manage the blogs I follow. According to Blog Reader, I am following 354 blogs. I use the Blog Reader to catch up on what people are talking about in the OSR blogosphere. Since I can sometimes go for several days without checking up on my own blog, blog reader is invaluable for allowing me to see what was posted on other blogs, while I was away.

Lately, i've been having some problems with Blog Reader. It only allows me to see the last 2-12 hours worth of blog posts. Thus, it has been a real challenge keeping up with what's going on out there. As a result, I am missing some excellent posts. Am I the only one who is experiencing this? Last time I checked, there was a 47-entry thread on the Google-problems site where others are complaining of this same problem. If you don't use Blog Reader, what do you use to keep up with your OSR fellow-travellers?

13 comments:

  1. Eternal Keep is useful:
    eternalkeep.blogspot.com

    A lot of Google glitches seem to be related to how they manage the iGoogle logins (i.e. I can't leave comments unless I use the liberal 'cookie' setting in a browser, etc.)

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  2. I've had similar difficulties with the reader, and sign-in shennanigans abound like scottsz mentions.

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  3. @scottsz:
    Recently did a kind of similar effort as Eternal Keep, and am now at 560+ rpg blogs.
    nirdday.blogspot.com

    @Paladin: but, if you want to keep up with all threads, it may be just as useless, because posts get pushed off the readable list once they're about three days old. You have to click through to see if anything was there.

    BTW how do you manage to read so many threads anyway?

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  4. I only used Readers once, but have heard lots of problems with Google Reader and Blogger in general, these days.

    I noticed once on Tim's dashboard, it only gave the last 12 hours but in my dashboard I had much more.

    I dunno.

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  5. I don't use the reader, but I have noticed that my blogroll isn't kept up to date, so I often find I miss new posts, too.

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  6. At blogger.com/home there's a link to the "dashboard," where you can add all of the blogs you follow to a "reading list" displayed at the bottom. That's what I use to keep up. It works about 99% of the time. The other 1% I have to click on a blog where I haven't heard from the author in awhile, to make sure they're still alive and posting.

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  7. I, too, use Google Reader to organize my gamer blogs. I only have twenty-some, but I can see all posts for all time and haven't had any problems in the past two weeks. I typically use Chrome.

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  8. I use Google Reader, too, without issue. But all of google's coding seems to run well on Chrome. I guess that makes sense.

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  9. @Jaap: That is awesome. Many thanks for posting that link. Nice work!

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  10. I use Google Reader rather than the blog reader, too. I do have an occasional problem where the reader can't mark posts as read, though, but it's infrequent and doesn't seem to prevent me from reading posts in the first place.

    I split my game blogs into two folders, one marked "d&d" (for those that primarily talk about 0e/1e) and another marked "rpg" (for those that stray farther.) It all gets read, though.

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  11. @scottsz-Thanks! Glad folks are finding it useful.

    I checked out the big 500+ link site but it only seems to load part of the list even when you click on all.

    The widget gives up on me at about 250 but I'm working on a work around. :)

    I use it everyday to keep up with you guys. :)

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  12. I use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/home.html) and have for a few years. I prefer not to put all by eggs in the goggle basket, and I hate their UI.

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