The eOK .network

I used to only have Google Reader for reading feeds, but soon I realised that using a single reader wasn’t ideal because too often feeds from sites that update quickly, such as digg or Engadget, began to dominate the reader. This was terrible as I often didn’t have enough time to screen through all of them to get to some of the gems in less frequently updated personal blogs.

The solution: multiple RSS readers with different interfaces for different feeds. Here’s how I organise my readings…

Google Reader (Morning coffee reader)
This is my default reader still, but I use it only to read “normal” blogs with full posts feeds. The design of Google Reader’s Expanded View allows you to jump from post to post without even touching the mouse, making it the perfect morning coffee reader. It is therefore a waste to have partial posts feeds in the reader because to complete the read, I’ll have to grab the mouse and navigate out of the Reader risking coffee spills on my keyboard.

Google Desktop Web Clips (FYI news)
Because I use a widescreen laptop, I kinda have “spare” real estate to the side of my desktop where I keep a permanent Google Desktop bar. One of the gadgets that comes with the bar is Web Clips, an RSS headline reader. Now this is useful for news sites that only have partial feeds or sites that update very often. I use this for feeds I have on this bar include digg, lifehacker, news.com, etc. I generally regard these feeds as nice to have, but non-critical.

SharpReader (Slap-me-in-the-face alerts)
This one is somewhat unique to me and my job. As a PR consultant I take it upon myself to know my client’s news (preferably before they do). So what I do is grab the keyword filtered feeds off Google News and stuff them into SharpReader. The reason I use SharpReader is because it has a pop-up alert which shows the headlines whenever a feed is updated. Since I’ve already given so much desktop real estate to Google Desktop, I figured pop-up were better than a news ticker reader. And besides, the pop-ups are more effective in grabbing my attention.