RSS feed reader options - the saga continues

When Google Reader was retired, I posted about my search for a replacement.

Eventually I settled on TheOldReader.   This had a few headaches - too many other people made the same choice, so they had performance problems.  Then they were going to shut down.   They they got help and weren't shutting any more.   Now they've siaid that only the first 100 subscriptions are free, and that people need to pay to have more than this.   The design still looks a bit clunky.

I may yet end up paying them $30/year - it's not unreasonable for the service.   But OTOH, I don't see paying a small amount for any service as a guarantee that it will actually survive.

But in the meantime, I'm hunting for options again.    Here's some info about what I've tried.

InoReader

The first tool that has caught my eye is InoReader.   It is

... a Cloud based RSS Reader aimed to fully replace Google Reader and even provide additional tools and functionalities for power users.
Initially it came to life as a proof of concept project, but the author quickly realized that such system cannot be managed and handled by single person for a long time, so the development and support was handled to a company ...

You can register separately, or log in using Facebook or Google accounts. It will import subscription files from the reader part of Google's Takeout file, or other OPML format files.

Google use Google-Sites, so we should too!

This QuickTip explains why I now feel happier about using elements from Google Sites in my blogs.

What is Google Sites, and why would a Blogger use it

Long ago (back in the late 2000's) there was a product called Google Pages, which people could use to make their own simple websites. It wasn't the greatest product that Google ever made (or purchased), and eventually it was retired, with websites made with Pages transferred over to the newer Google Sites.

Sites always seemed a bit clunky. It doesn't seem to have a huge number of users.   And there are vastly better products for building more-complex websites, and for building simple ones (eg using Blogger to make a "real" website).

Now, I did use a Sites filing cabinet as the document-store for one of my sites that makes lyrics of certain public domain songs available in PowerPoint format. I chose it before Google Drive had been released, and when Docs was not nearly as good as it is now. And SEO does matter for this blog, so I came to appreciate that the link to a file in sites includes the file-name.

But I've always had a nagging sense that one day Sites would be retired too, and I'd have to move my files and edit all my posts to re-set the links.

Why won't Google retire Google Sites

Despite my previous misgivings, I'm now feeling a lot more relaxed about Google Sites.  

Why?   Well I don't have a crystal ball.   But this recent post from the Google Testing blog talks about how they are into "dogfooding" and that Sites is one of the tools they do this with, to " host team pages, engineering docs and more"

Just to explain, "dogfooding" is corporate-jargon for using your own products. As in "eating your own dogfood".  It's sometimes called "drinking your own chapmpagne" in companies that see themselves as a bit more refined, or "eating your own cooking".

Google's post is telling us that they are using Sites for building tools that they use in their own work. Most likely, they have a website built in Sites, which manages their plans for future Blogger development, and available only to people inside the company and working on the Blogger project.

So that makes me feel reassured that most likely:

1. Sites won't be canned any time soon, or
2. If Sites is turned off, Google will have a replacement tool which will provide the same (and better) features, and they will convert items now built in Sites to this better tool.

Phew!

Maybe it's time to review my file-hosting approach again, or to re-visit Sites and look at their FAQs, home-page and support-community, to see what other Sites tools I might find useful.

How have you used Sites in conjunction with your blog?

---

Related Articles:

File-hosting options: places to store files that you share from your blog

Why SEO doesn't matter for lots of bloggers

New Google+ badges and follow buttons can be used in Blogger

This Quick-tip introduces the new Google+ plugins that Google released in late June 2013

Recently, Google+ Developers blog announced a vastly improved set of Google+ plugins for use with websites.

Most (all?) of them are not yet available as Blogger gadgets, so you have to get the code from the Google+ resources site, and add it to your blog like you would add any 3rd party code.

The new options include a more "industry-standard" follow on Google+ button, and new badges for Pages, Communities and Hangouts, as seen here. (I've previously explained why you might like to have a G+ community alongside your blog.)

They are configurable (size, dark/light, style, etc) - but  you need to work out how to apply the configuration settings to the code.   That said, I've added them to this site without any configuration (see the top of the sidebar), and the default options appear to work well. And it's not actually as hard as it looks: in general you just follow the pattern of:

• Changing   https://plus.google.com/{pageId}     to link to the "thing" (Page, Community, Profile) that you are displaying in the badge.

• Using the "<div class="g-page" data-href="https://plus.google.com/{pageId}"></div>" form of the code, ie the one that's completely inside a "div" statement.

• Adding extra information to it using "data-"   for example,   "<div class="g-page" data-href="https://plus.google.com/{pageId}" data-layout="landscape" data-width="200">

There is one interesting sentence in the announcement:

"Existing badges will stick around for up to 90 days, giving you time to configure the new version for your website. After 90 days, we'll automatically upgrade any Google+ badges to the new design."

I wonder how that will relate to the Google + gadgets that are available in Blogger's Add-a-gadget function now - maybe they will be automatically be changed too.   (In 90 days ... yeah, right ...)

Why enabling a mobile template just became more important to some bloggers

This QuickTip explains some recent announcements from Google  about SEO and mobile devices, and what they mean for Blogger users.

If SEO matters for your blog, and your blog is relevant for users with moble devices, then you pretty much need to enable a mobile template.

Why?   In short, because this recent post from Webmaster Central says that for Google the ranking of search results on mobile devices is now impacted by how well sites are optimized for mobile devices.

This means that if you haven't set up your blog for mobile, then it won't come up so highly in the search results seen by mobile users.

As well as the template, there are a range of other factors that affect how well your site works for mobile. Blogger users cannot control a lot of them, though we can think about:

• Page load speed 
• Using the Pages gadget as the top menu bar, rather than a linked-list or labels gadget, - because it converts into a drop-down menu in when a mobile template is applied.

Also, remember that if you make a home-page using a custom re-direct, this will only work in your desktop version. The re-direct isn't applied for mobile viewers, they just see your most recent posts in mobile-friendly tiles.

Tell Google more about the posts in your blog with Webmaster Central's Data Highlighter - now supporting more data types

This QuickTip is about the new types of "things" which the Data Highlighter tool knows about.

In December 2012, Google introduced the Data Highlighter (DH) - this is a tool that lets you point to items in your blog posts LINK and use them to teach Google how you write about certain things.

Now they have announced that this tool has been extended to cover schema.org definitions of seven new types of things:

• Products
• Local businesses
• Articles
• Software applications
• Movies
• Restaurants
• TV episodes

The basic instructions for using the DH tool have not changed: visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

Google now advise that "The tagging process takes about 5 minutes for a single page, or about 15 minutes for a pattern of consistently formatted pages."

After you have done some tagging, you can verify Google's understanding of your structured data. If Google has understood your work correctly, and you "publish" it to Google, then, when your site is displayed in search results, Google will use enhanced displays of information "like prices, reviews, and ratings".

It will take time for this to happen: Google needs to re-index your blog-posts before it takes effect.

Note:  schema.org is a markup language that this tool is based on.    However not all item types are covered by the tool at the moment.   So, for example, we can only use the Data Highlighter tool to show Google how articles, products, TV-show episodes etc are represented on our blogs.    It doesn't go into more detail for things like blog-posts which schema.org does have definitions for.

How to access your Google Custom Maps after migrating to the new Google Maps

This QuickTip is about how to access your existing Google Custom Maps, once you have started using the new Google Maps interface being introduced in mid 2013.

Google is now offering the opportunity to migrate to new Google maps.  (ref: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-new-google-maps-now-available.html)

However one disadvantage is that "My Places", which includes Google Custom Maps, is not part of the new Google Maps interface.

At the moment, you can temporarily switch to the old interface by clicking the "options" icon in the black navigation bar and

• Selecting "My Places" OR
• Clicking the "classic maps" link.

Or you can get to them by navigating to https://www.google.com/maps/myplaces

From here you can see and edit your existing Google Custom Maps, but you cannot create new ones. To do that, you need to use Google Maps Engine Lite - which was announced recently.