I pretty much know myself in this strange life on the wire we're all collectively hallucinating so it did not come as a surprise to me to discover today that, sure enough, I let Google Reader expire without asserting an alternative. I was hoping whoever was in charge of Reeder would punt something for the desktop application in time for the switch but this did not occur.
I don't know, this does not seem to me to be a thing which should require an application that I pay for to accomplish, but this possibly seems to be (as I read the descriptions of all these various alternatives) because I used Reader in this incredibly bone-headed, simplistic way, as just a list of updates on a fairly discrete number of blogs and websites. All the blah-blah-blah about social and subfolders and the mobile app makes me want to take a nap. I just want to know when one of less than 30 things posts and update okay? I don't want to share, promote, or recommend anything, at least not from there. I don't want you to curate any news for me or show me Around the Web.
Should I be milling around at some lower level of the RSS protocol? It seems like this is something that my browser should just do for me for free without a lot of set up and hassle. Maybe it's more complicated than I understand. I can feel myself getting seriously generation-gapped on this one, even my basic paradigm - reading inside the browser on a desktop computer -is hopelessly mired in the last decade's paradigm.
Meanwhile, looking at what I was actually following (all laid out in plain XML courtesy of Google Takeout) it boils down to:
2 of my own blogs (I think I put them on originally just to see how updating was working)
3 blogs that update regularly
3 blogs that have not been updated in a really long time
11 blogs that are infrequently and irregularly updated (some of which are no doubt on their way to joining the previous 3 in the category prior to this one)
2 apparently defunct webcomics
2 webcomics that update consistently on a fixed schedule
1 very routinely updated art and design website with a tumblr-ish output
1 artist's tumblr that updates infrequently with long pauses
1 artist's tumblr that updates far too frequently and I'm only interested in about 5% of the material
1 personal page of a moderately famous person who posts everything they blog to Google Plus anyway
and an ongoing video series that tends to update the YouTube well in advance of its own site and posts everything new on Plus anyway.
Not totally sure I have a problem to solve after all.
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