30 October 2007

Manage RSS Feeds using iGoogle and Google Reader

RSS feeds have become an integral part of internet users these days, but the major problem is managing RSS feeds, there are lot of desktop based feed readers and online feed readers available. I won't go in much detail of all these services to explain which is best and which is not etc.. I will discuss my own case here and if you feel its best for you, you can try that too. Google reader is a great service and is most commonly used feed reader application today.

For a working professional like me its not a great option though to have Google reader opened in office hours as it can distract me from my work, and also can lead me to read too many feeds in a day. You have to be very careful with the number of feeds you subscribe to otherwise you might end up with 100's of feed and may struggle reading them everyday.

Google's IGoogle homepage is a perfect answer for anyyone who has been struggling with 100's of feed and is wasting too many hours on google reader or any other feed reader.
In my case, in a daily routine i am just bothered about news related to india(rediff), Cricket(Cricinfo.com) and BBC world news. so i have got a news Tab with feeds from these popular websites. I would also like to get an update from popular tech blogs to keep myself updated, but such blogs only post twice or thrice in a day.. so to have separate widget for each of these blogs will fill in my homepage space and i might not notice new updates easily.

I use most of the services provided by google like gmail, blogger, google search, adsense, webmaster tool, analytics, picasa, google reader, orkut or we can say 70% of the websites i visit daily are from google and google has got separate blogs for each of these services. So the best way to get updates from these blogs is to Add their feed into Google Reader and Group them inside tag Google blogs.
Once you are finished with that you can add the Google Reader widget to your iGoogle homepage through this link and you will find that inside one widget you can access updates from all these blogs quite easily.

So in a way, i have saved lot of my homepage space by getting the google reader widget and also i can keep those news widgets which will have quite regular updates along with this widget.