Widget Update

You might have noticed already that First Person has two new widgets. The first one shows the articles I have shared on my Google Reader shared page. I first tried Reader some time back, and I have been a major fan of it ever since. I make it a point to check my Reader at least once a day every morning (usually more than that). The one feature that sets Google Reader apart from other feed readers is its sharing feature. Whenever I like an article I am reading, I just click on the ‘Share’ button and my friends in GMail who use Google Reader, get to read that article, and it also appears on my shared items page. This concept of sharing is great, and provides an excellent way to read good stuff and discover new feeds. But not everyone uses Google Reader, and while I have been persuading many of my friends to start using it, they don’t seem too enthusiastic. It seemed such a sad thing that only a few Reader friends could see my shared articles, until I saw that good old WordPress had a feed widget and my shared items page offered a feed! It didn’t take me long to put two and two together, and now, you’ll be able to see what I am sharing in Reader right here on my blog! That way, you’ll never be short on good stuff to read.

The second one is also an RSS feed widget. This one shows you my latest tweets. I rambled on some time back about how I wasn’t writing as regularly as I wished to, even though I had lots to say, and that’s when the microblogging concept seemed useful. I had known about Twitter a long time back, but it simply didn’t appeal to me at that time. Now however, I am giving it a shot. You can see my tweets in the widget here, or follow me. You can find me on http://twitter.com/prasannapandit.

Also, my blog, First Person completed one full year this August. So happy birthday First Person, and all that.

Reader – The Google way of managing feeds

Edit: Reader now has a search bar. And you can hide the side navigation too.

I finally tried out Google Reader today (don’t know what took me so long). Reader is Google’s RSS/Atom feed reading tool, which allows you to subscribe to websites. This means that whenever the website is updated, you’ll be able to read it (full articles or summaries as the case may be) inside Reader. Obviously, it’s a great way of keeping track of new material posted on websites without having to open each website everyday. Of course, the website has to offer feeds for this to work.

So how good is Reader? Like all things Google, Reader’s biggest plus is its simple and easy-to-use UI. It took me less than two minutes to subscribe to a bunch of websites. You can subscribe by entering the feed URL of the website and if you don’t know it, you can just type the keywords and the search option will give you one. For certain social sites (Blogger, LJ, Flickr, etc) you can simply enter the user name of your friend, which makes the whole thing very simple. I see WordPress missing from the list, so you’ll have to add me manually. Categorizing them is also simple enough and in an instant, all my friends’ blogs went into the Blogs folder. The amazing thing is, you can actually share your Reader with others using the URL Google provides you.

On the downside, Reader cannot recognize if you have already subscribed to a site if you have changed its name. Of course, it is still under development, so I’m sure it will be fixed (if it wasn’t intended to behave like that).

For those who don’t want to use browser add-ons to read stuff from their favorite sites, Reader provides an excellent option, since everyone has a Google account anyway. To subscribe to this blog, use the RSS URL http://prasannapandit.wordpress.com/feed/ .