The Friendly vs. Unfriendly
Ever since I learned about the convenience of the RSS feeder system, I have been finding it very useful. It allows me to check out a variety of headlines without having to go to the actual website, and it tells me whether or not I have already read the article. However, the only problem with this is the organization of the multiple feeders. For about a week, I have been going through a variety of systems in attempt to determine how I would like them to appear on my computer. At first, I started utilizing Feedreader3, a free desktop system that organizes your feeders, but I found it irritable to use because only a few of the readers would work at a time. So then I quickly switched to www.newsgator.com because it was a little easier to navigate through and consistently updated the feeds. The only aspect I really did not like about this site was the layout—all of the feeders stay cluttered on the left side of the website and if you have a lot of them like I do, it is difficult to get a good over view of all the updated articles. After going through all of this trouble between RSS feeders, I decided to organize the feeds through Mozilla’s bookmarks. Although this was convenient because I could place the feeds in the bookmark toolbar next to my other “favorites”, again, it kept everything cluttered.
However, I was recently introduced to a web-based news feeder that I found very useful from www.netvibes.com; it is by far the best feeder I have come across. It reminded me a lot of my Google homepage where I could place the weather, email, news headlines, calendar, and etc. all on one page. Netvibes is even more user-friendly because of its organized layout and the ability to easily add feeds or other options. By hovering my mouse over each article, I can get a quick preview and if my page gets too full of feeders, I can also add a tab on the homepage. I have now replaced my homepage from Google to Netvibes. With Netvibes, I can scope out all of updates from my favorite news websites and blogs, find weather information, check the calendar, and view my mail.
