I've looking into building a Google Reader alternative for quite some time now. Because let's face it, Google Reader has been neglected since forever. This news prompts me to finally do it. Tell me what you think: http://getfishwrap.com/
Google Reader shutting down
601–610 of 726 posts
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
theoldreader seems to have died on my feed import to the best I can tell, anyone seen anything similar? It says it is still working in the background, but no update past the first 3 it imported...
It's definitely slow right now.Just wait a few minutes.
FINALLY. I let it work overnight and they finally showed. Now if only they would work on the OAUTH limits mentioned above.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#603Pretty irritated at the way Google takes moderately successful services that can't possibly cost them all that much to keep running and puts them down the memory hole, to foster the happy illusion that everything that everything that Google does turns to gold. I'm sure there's more engagement with Reader than Plus, with its millions of users who don't really use it (many of whom aren't even really aware that they are…
Are you sure the shutdown is to foster an illusion?
Maybe there simply isn't a good upside to keep this service going and its a business decision?
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#604This has been a long time coming. Four years ago I began work on my own feed reader, NewsBlur, and it's now a full-fledged Google Reader competitor. It's also a paid app and has been paying for itself nearly since the beginning. http://www.newsblur.com I hope HN finds NewsBlur useful, especially since it's got native mobile apps on iOS (iPhone+iPad), Android, Windows Phone, and Nokia MeeGo. Native story sharing was l…
I'm sure this has been reported already but, after creating an account I see:
"NewsBlur experienced an error
The error has been logged and will be fixed soon so you won't have to see this message again."
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can get all your Gmail data over standard IMAP. If you don't take advantage that to make personal backups, you are a fool.
Is there software that connects over IMAP and archives all your mail into one file? Not an email client.
I use gmvault: http://gmvault.org/
It stores the mail in a folder tree rather than a single file, but that's fine by me. It's open source & cross platform.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
You bet! It's OAuth-based import, so when you create your account it's just a click away. Couldn't be easier. EDIT: And OPML is the other option when you signup. It's an easy import process, since it's really quite important to get that part right.
So I didn't import the first time I created the account - how do I re-import?! :)
Just click on the "+" button to add a new feed. In the dialog there is a button "Import from Google Reader or upload OPML".
A small warning: the OPML import will delete you current sites and replace them with the ones from OPML, they will not be merged with the current ones you have.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#607Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google is one of those companies that make me feel like a wuss for being their customer. Okay, in this case one could (convincingly) argue that advertisers are the real customers of Google Reader, but I would have gladly just paid for the service. Apple is another such company for me, and I dumped considerable amounts of money into them, and they similarly just let me know with every single action that I'm not their…
You really should get off Gmail. At the very least, use a domain and google apps for your domain, to keep the option of fleeing later. Even for search, there are really only a few companies crawling now -- Google, Bing/MS, and Blekko. I'm going to try Bing for a month (I tried in the past, and it wasn't great, but was close) and Blekko for another month, but I'm pretty sure I don't care about any other Google service…
I tried having my own domain's mail for a while, and got burned hard when my (cheap) webhost's servers were down for a couple of days. It's hard to argue with free, easy, and reliable when the alternative is costly, difficult, and more likely to go down.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm. I personally have needed to use Google Code Search several times since it shut down, but have never found your site. When I've looked for alternatives by searching Google (say, for "code search"), I've found Koders (now Ohloh code search), but not yours. It seems like you might need to do a bit more SEO.
Yes I certainly do. I have been working on it, but Koders and Ohloh are pretty established so its a long climb. I think the .de domain might be hurting a little bit too. Happy to listen to any actionable items that can address this though.
Check out the periodic table of SEO: http://searchengineland.com/seotable
Kalzmeus on SEO (click around his blog for more, guy's a genius): http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
Also some quick, simple advice:
1. Blog 2/3 times per week minimum. Target a single, relevant keyword per blog post (relevant to your domain). The post title, H1s, H2s etc, image tags should all contain your primary keyword. Blog posts don't have to be long, but they do have to be useful.
2. Build a G+, FB, Twitter account for your site if you haven't already. Blast out your new posts to these accounts using Hootsuite (free, but you can pay if you like).
3. Build an audience on the social networks - just search around, follow relevant people and share useful, educational material. Don't spam.
4. Personalised mass email from Google Docs and Gmail (kind of hesitant to recommend this in light of Google shuttering services!): http://www.labnol.org/internet/personalized-mail-merge-in-gm... you need to have "newsletter" signs ups (blast out a digest of your blog posts once per month), calls to actions etc on your site for this to work properly (i.e. optimise your site to capture names & emails). Great, low cost/free way to make sure your audience stays engaged and coming back to your site. You can pay for this kind of service too, e.g. Mailchimp (they've a free tier), Constant Contact, or the likes of Hubspot for full suite of marketing automation tools.
5. Best of Startup marketing/SEO here, that I've compiled over the years (absolute gold): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag_fyIIMSJ6DdGt...
6. Check out Sell More Software by patio11: http://www.hyperink.com/Sell-More-Software-Website-Conversio...
Many engineers don't fully appreciate marketing as patio11 would be quick to point out, but there's a start.
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK, Cloudflare does not cache HTML files, full stop.
I believe it does - I use Cloudflare with my blog and every file, including *.html files, appears to be served by them.
The documentation and marketing on cloudflare.com is a bit misleading on this. Unless you do something unusual and potentially fragile with their page rules, it does not cache HTML: https://support.cloudflare.com/entries/22094188--Does-CloudF... It will hit your server for every page request.
(In fact it only caches certain static files as determined by their file extension. It does not seem to pay much attention to Content-Type of Cache headers. Ugh.)
Re: Google Reader shutting down
#610People have said repeatedly that RSS is dead, and that's apparently true, but I've been wondering for a few years now what has replaced it? It's not like social networks provide the same kind of service, really. So is getting updates from people and projects you care about really such a niche thing? Have I missed some other huge channel that supersedes RSS? Or are we about to actually lose something profound here? Ku…
As someone who used to use RSS feeds and doesn't any more, I've replaced it with a mixture of: checking websites for stuff that updates frequently like news, e-mail subscriptions for infrequent but important updates, and twitter (or similar) subscriptions for stuff that I can afford to miss.
Why not RSS? Formatting was often not quite right - if I wanted to read something, I often ended up clicking through to the original site anyway. And I didn't like the e-mail style expectation that I would read everything, or at least mark it as read (which felt like admitting defeat). It just began to feel like a chore. When I log in to twitter, it doesn't tell me that I have 1439 unread tweets.