Reader's Digest

The vultures are circling round Google Reader. Those two nice men at Google are pulling the plug on it in July.

So I took the opportunity to jump before I was pushed, and I had a look at what the Linux community has for blog readers. I tried out four different readers from the standard Ubuntu repositories. All of them were either stand-alone apps or extensions of mail clients, by the way.

My standard home-office machine is an ageing Gateway with 512 MB RAM. I'm currently running Lubuntu 11.04. And what runs on Ubuntu doesn't necessarily run on Lubuntu, which is a much more Spartan desktop environment. So I wasn't making it easy for the candidates ;)

And behold the white smoke over St Peter's - we have a reader.

yarssr is popular, but got stuck starting up on my antediluvian machine.

There are extensions for the Thunderbird and Evolution email clients, but I had never used either. I tried both and had trouble setting up the main apps on which the extensions depend.

(By the way, I've heard good things about the Firefox extension for RSS, but I don't use Firefox at the moment, so I didn't try.)

Blam installed and worked fine, with one big but. I was able to import my subscriptions, but simply as a list, and I'll be buggered if I'm going to spend 20 minutes putting them all back in their categories.

And the winner is Liferea.

If you need to do lots of fancy things, read the specs and reviews first. However I just need a pretty simple application. And liferea seems to do the simple stuff fine. It has the same three-pane view as Google and most other readers, so no surprises there. It's not as fast as Google, but I only noticed the lag when marking-as-read all the hundreds of old posts.


And importing my subscriptions in the right folders was pretty simple. You download a file called OPML from GR and import it to the new reader. Google it.

If you hear of more, let me know.

Till then, byeeee.

PS While writing this on Google Blogger, I noticed that the autocorrect doesn't recognise the word "blog". Tee hee.

Thanks for a lovely future.

This is my first January as part of an online community of EFL teachers. I started reading blogs around this time last year, starting with the venerable Ken Wilson, and accumulating more blogs through the blogrolls. In March I was persuaded - very much against my instinct - to start tending my own little vegetable patch.

And now I can't imagine what the hell I did without it....

Readers and writers, colleagues and penpals,

Thanks for what you've done,

but even more, thanks for what you're going to do this year.

[Oh and a tiny footnote. I didn't see this post because I hadn't realised that Chiew Pang's A CLIL to Climb has moved!]

VOSIAWFOT

What day is it...? Where am I...? Are those my feet...? Is Nixon still President...? 

Is it too late to nominate favourite blogs for the Whatsisname Awards...?

Having decided not to nominate anybody (too hurtful, as Chiew Pang says), 

a couple of glasses of Ribeiro have forced me to change my mind...

I hereby nominate

Lathophobic Aphasia 

for the category of 

Voice of Sanity in a World Full of Twats. 

[OK, he doesn't actually blog about teaching, but he is an ESOL teacher.]

A VOSIAWFOT performs a great public service for us all: Follow the blog and you will read all about the Mormons, the Privatisation of Little Chef, the Overbearing Husbands, the Littel Priques and much much more.

[Edit - Apparently the category of VOSIAWFOT has been removed this year. Just read the blog.]