Feedly

I gave Pulse a good try, but it just wasn't working for my blog-reading purposes. It's good for news sites where you want to scan headlines but only read the text occasionally, and I really wanted something that would tell me which blog posts were new since I checked last.

The two main contenders I considered were Feedly and Bloglovin. The reviews were helpful - I learned that in Bloglovin, you have to click through to the original post to read the full text. Yikes. That would have been exasperating for me, so I ran the other direction very quickly and downloaded Feedly.

That works fine. It was very low-stress setting it up. It asked for access to my Google Reader account, so don't go with Feedly if you don't want them accessing your Google Reader info, but it syncs fine with it, back and forth. I was able to organize with as many blogs per category as I liked; none of that twenty-blog-maximum nonsense. I haven't quite gotten the hang of how much of a post you have to read for it to mark it read, so often I will get through a category and then click the "mark all as read" checkmark at the top to clear it out - which is an extra step, but not bad. Feedly also has a very friendly user interface for their app.

I did keep Pulse for news sites, though. It's nice for browsing on my Kindle.