plzkthxbai

Often the lunch conversation at work turns to books. Many of my coworkers are avid readers. I, on the other hand, NEVER read books! I can’t remember the last time I’ve read an actual book. I spend most of my “reading time” reading blog post after blog post on a quest to learn as much as possible. It’s actually turning into quite a time-consuming hobby of mine. According to Google Reader Trends, I read approximately 600 blog posts each month. While that might seem like a lot (it is), only a fraction of the blogs I track are even read in Google Reader. I also use Apple Mail, Twitter, and the good ol’ website approach to keep up with the news.

The major topics that I follow are general technology news, mobile news, web/internet news, and Apple news. This includes blogs like TechCrunch, AppleInsider, Daring Fireball, The Google Blog, and Twitter news sources. I’m fascinated with technology and absolutely love to read about the future and how the web is evolving. I think this is a testament to the fact that I picked the perfect career. Not only am I learning a ridiculous amount of stuff about technology, but I’ve also noticed that my writing has been improving as a result of all this reading. I’m always looking to streamline my method for consuming all this news, and I’ve found a few tools that work great.

Some of my feeds are in Apple Mail. This used to be my primary reader.

Apple Mail is my mail client on my Mac. I use it for my IMAP email accounts and I also use it to track a few of my news feeds. Mail is a great app for tracking feeds if you 1) are always on the same computer, 2) don’t require sharing capabilities, and 3) don’t care about syncing with other devices. I use Mail to track my friends’ blogs who update infrequently and those blogs which I’m not in a big hurry to read.

Google Reader has become my primary feed reader recently. The main reason I switched over to Google Reader from Apple Mail was my desire to keep track of feeds from multiple devices. I use 2 different laptops on a daily basis and I needed a centralized place to track my feeds. Also, Google Reader is really good at syncing with mobile devices like my iPhone. Now I can read a post on my phone and it will show up as read on the Google Reader website. This is analogous to using the IMAP protocol for email. Finally, Google Reader allows you to have “friends” and share interesting posts with them. I don’t use this feature much right now, but it’s handy to have.

Newstand is a feed reader application for the iPhone. One of it’s major selling points is keeping itself in sync with my Google Reader account. It also offers offline support so you can download posts you’d like to read before your internet-less flight.  Newsstand is available for $4.99 in the Apple App Store (iTunes link). I highly recommend it for anyone who is heavily reliant on feeds. Here are a few screenshots:

A fancy feed view for Newsstand.

My preferred home screen for tracking feeds.