Saturday, July 13, 2013

The Death of a Reader

I began reading EVE blogs the day after I made the move from Blackberry to iPhone. I did not make the jump to iPhone as a leap onto any bandwagon. I like living in rural areas, I made the move from one rural area where Sprint had the best service to another rural area where AT&T had the only service. I like fancy toys and Blackberry seemed to be on the decline, iPhone it is! I have stuck with the iPhone for much the opposite reasons I like PCs over Mac products. With the PC you have a higher degree of customization available to you and because of that and the performance options that brings more games are developed for it. (That and its probably cheaper to develop for the PC) I do not need that same level of customization in my phone. I need one that works well, has enough "options" that I can do neat things with it in the few minutes I have to spare. That and I have purchased a few apps I don't want to have to repurchase. :)
The Capsuleer App was published and still active the day I made the switch so I grabbed it from the App Store. Prior to the iPhone and Capsuleer all of my EVE reading came from the various Wiki sites. I found this really cool little section of Capsuleer that had an RSS reader and began reading EVE blogs.
It wasn't long before Capsuleer development stopped and I started looking for another way to get to the EVE blogs. A bit of Googling brought me to the famous EVE Blog Pack link. I googled again for a decent iPhone app to read the feed, down loaded FeedlerRSS and resumed my reading of Internet Spaceships on the go.
As the blog pack changed and I followed links from listed blogs to non listed blogs my reading list grew and grew. Every few months I would log into my Google account and trim the dead branches of my reading list. Some of the blogs on my list I read as they were posted and some I would save for when I had enough time to read several posts, there are a few good reads that benefit from serial reading, Tiger Ears being one of them.
As my life has grown busier and busier over the last few years the ease of use and functionality of the Google Reader account has kept me connected to the game I had little time for with little to no effort. I was saddened the day I read the big G was discontinuing their service. I did a bit of checking around and found that several different groups were heading up efforts in developing a replacement for the service. By this time I had begun actively playing the EVE again and spare time was valuable, any time not spent with Family or Work was spent playing EVE. My confidence in someone coming up with a service that was as easy to use as Reader coupled with my lack of time has left me in a sort of rut. I did not start Feedly before the end of Reader and missed importing my lists. I have also not been able to find another service that is as simple as Reader was. As a consequence my reading has dropped off considerably, I have down loaded a few blog reading apps and will continue to search for an easy to use service.
There may well be an easy to use service that I have missed with my casual search of options, hopefully this weekend (mine are 1 day weekends) will lend enough time to play some EVE, find a good RSS service and get it linked to an App on my iPhone.

4 comments:

  1. I'm curious what you find difficult with Feedly? It works awesome for me and is just as simple to use as Reader. When was the last time you tried it? (it's had a few updates in the past few weeks is why I ask, so it might be better now than when you tried it).

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    1. I also switched to feedly after Google made the announcement of dropping Google Reader. I wish I had switched sooner. I use Feedly with chrome and android. You might be able to get your Google Reader data with Google Takeout until July 15th.

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    2. Last time I tried it was the day after the iOS update was released on the app store. To be fair my time throughout the day Mon-Sat is scheduled with very little free time. So if I have to read or explore new menu options it kinda throws my schedule off. I have the odd few minute break to tab out of work but other than that it is nose to the grindstone. Evenings are family with 30-45 minutes of EVE before bed. I am hoping to poke around with Feedly some more tonight and tomorrow to give it another chance. There are two more that I have DLed but not given much thought and can't remember the names right now.

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    3. And I did finally grab the Google Takeout. From what I am hearing Feedly was kinda seamless if you started before the 1st of July.

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