So I’m not sure what to do about problems I find in Google Reader. I looked for a bug report mechanism but didn’t find it yet. During the trip I found myself with very discreet snatches of time where I could read, and I started at the top. As a result, I built up these discontinuous pockets of stuff I had read.
Today, it tells me I have over 100+ items in the queue, it shows the feeds and articles in the left side panel, but when it runs out of the new things it tells me there is nothing new in the main panel. If I read the individual feeds, I get all of the right articles and can read them, but it’s a drag and a slow process. The newest article in all of these says it is 4 days old. I suspect there is a bug in handling when you have a point where one article and the next oldest are very far apart in time (in RSS reader terms.) New things are still coming in and going to the top, but anything older than that breaking point is going to take manual handling. Kind of a drag.
So now this is out there. Since the zeists gave me so much static for never reporting the Revver issue, maybe I should work harder to find out what to do with this knowledge. On the other hand, if a data-mining company like Google can’t find out this information about itself it doesn’t really deserve to know, right?
i definitely noticed some issues w/ the reader but nothing that would make me want to go back to bogline…
mostly when it comes to scrolling through a feed that has multiple new posts (like the aggregation lists that have multiple authors) the left pane doesn’t keep up w/ the read count – so i usually manually mark all as read – no big deal but still a bug…
a bug report would be nice…
Hey Dave;
I think the mechanism they want you to use is the GReader google group at http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Labs-Reader (the path from reader isn’t transparent: click Help in the upper right on the GReader page, then on the bottom of that page click Discuss Reader (then sign up, blah, blah, blah)).
You could also email Nick Baum, the project manager at nickbaum{a t}google{d o t}com.
They know now (or as soon as your site is hit by their spider). But really, I bet they have a “google groups” group about it. Also, I know it’s a bit plain, and there are a lot of features I’d like to implement (searching, mobile reading, and improved usage of the XML model, maybe some ajax features), but I really enjoy FeedOnFeeds, which is all php/mysql (with some js thrown in), and since it’s oss, I can get in and modify it as much as I want. I’ve already worked towards implementing tagging.
I have also started using Google Reader as I like to catch up on all my feeds at work. One thing I don’t know if you can do is order the feeds so the oldest are first. Otherwise I’m scrolling through all my feeds and marking them as read even if I haven’t read them yet.
Am I missing something?
Dom, not sure about that one.
All, thanks for thie input. I tried to post my observation to that Google Groups thing. We’ll see how it goes.
Oh, and by the way Eldon, if you are the owner of the FeedOnFeeds installation at drift.wrek.gatech.edu (which seems freakishly likely), you really need to protect that with an .htaccess password or something. I’m just saying. I ran FoF for a year or two, and I needed the same thing or else the referrals of automatic link presentations began to pop it on to radars and then anyone in the world could fool with it.
And now it’s about 7 hours after I posted to that newsgroup (via Google groups) and it doesn’t seem to have gone through. If it doesn’t ever show, so be it. I’ve done my bit.
Sorry to hear that Reader is giving you trouble. The team was not paying full attention to the group last week due to the (U.S.) holiday, but feel free to email me with any details you can provide on the bug you’re seeing and we will see what we can do.
Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer