Google updates

[yendi]

1. After six days, I finally have my gmail back! Of course, a good ton of stuff bounced, and there's still lots of damage control to be done, but at least I have my account! Now, since every time I delete it's a slow, painful process (I just deleted five messages, and it took about twenty seconds), I'm going to try to tame the account gradually, and will set up forwarding to a backup account there (not to my new account, since I want to get rid of the massive amounts of back that's clogging my gmail inbox).

2. On the Google Reader front, I'm playing with RSSFrog, NetNewsWire, Opera, Newsblur, and even Google Reader itself to see which one works best for me just to consume news. I actually started using Reader years ago before it allowed sharing, and at the time, it was the best RSS reader out there (sorry, but it's true). Now, I'm trying to figure out what I need out of a reader and which is best. I did try River2, but have already eliminated it as a reader for me.

As for sharing, I've moved to Pinboard for now. I love the interface, and the ability for it to both pull in items I ask it to share with a bookmarklet, and links from both of my Twitter feeds. If you were following me on Reader and want to see my links, there's an RSS feed now that you can add to your reader of choice.

3. For all my snarking at Google over the awful Reader decision and my mail crisis, I do love G+ Hangouts, which I'm using for work to help organize a SIG. My co-organizer is in a different state, and our presenters are at a bunch of institutions.

Comments

[featheredfrog.livejournal.com]

Have you considered using fetchmail to grab gmail messages (from multiple accounts, even) and drop them on a local machine? I do this, don't seem to miss anything, and avoiding the web interface means I avoid most of these problems. Simple IMAP/POP client.

[yendi]

I actually want backup cloud storage, not local (although I might backup that backup to local), as for all my cloud concerns, I've also had the bad hard drive situation pop up, and at least most cloud services have plenty of backup drives.

[captain18.livejournal.com]

It's funny that you mention Google Reader, because I've been reading things about it on a blog written by one of the guys who once worked for Netscape. Ever looked at JWZ (http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/google-reader-mass-exodus-psa/)'s blog?

[yendi]

You're actually the second person to link to that post (well, juliansinger linked to the LJ mirror), any my reaction to is a combination of A) wow, JWZ is kind of an ass, and B) yeah, I wish NNW was half as good as advertised. It was shite six or seven years ago, when I committed to Reader, and it's better now, but still doesn't allow me to hide feeds with no new messages (only individual posts), which is a low-hanging fruit, deal-breaking feature for me (Opera seems to have the same problem).

That said, there are some good bits in the comments there. Alas, setting up Tiny Tiny RSS isn't really an option for me.

[captain18.livejournal.com]

JWZ is capable of being an ass, yes. But I've also found I appreciate his perspective when it comes to calling "bullshit" on web-related issues. And the non-stupid commenters are usually worth the signal to noise ratio.