No more Google Reader

When I called up my Google Reader this afternoon, I was surprised to learn that it will be closed down as of July 1. Who knew? I've been using Reader since before I was married, which is pretty much forever in technology years. But I loves my blogs, precious, and would miss them if the list disappeared, so today I went out foraging for a new feed reader.

Several reviews recommended Pulse. I assumed it would be like most sites, and you should sign up via web browser and then sync the Kindle to that, so I did. That web interface was the most exasperating thing. It had no functions - no buttons to push - no menus to find - the directions from online tutorials didn't work. Menus named didn't exist. I couldn't import my feeds from Reader, and I couldn't even figure out how to import the dratted blogs manually. I would have deleted my Pulse account then and there, but I couldn't figure out how to do it, since I couldn't even find the FAQs (hidden under "Feedback").

So. The welcome email said to feel free to reply if I had any questions. (To put it mildly.) I composed myself, then a very polite email explaining my problem, and shot it off. Not three hours later,  I got a response - in good English! - from a tech person at Pulse, walking me through how to import blogs. I tried it and it still didn't work.

At this point it dawned on me that all the instructions assumed you were on a mobile device.

So I got the Kindle app and tried it through there. Lo and behold, happy days, the missing buttons were right there. And they worked. Whew. So I spent the next three or four hours importing, arranging, organizing, and playing with my new toy.

My initial reaction is that Pulse has a pretty high learning curve, if you're coming off Google Reader. It would save a lot of frustration if you do your set-up via a mobile device in the first place. The interface, once it's going, is a lot of fun. It's image-based instead of text-based, so it will work better for some blogs than others.

One major difference is that you have to sort your blogs into folders of no more than twenty blogs each; I had about a hundred, so that forced me to look through and categorize them. But that needed doing anyway. Another thing to note is that it does not seem to have a "mark as read" function or list for you how many posts, exactly, are unread. Newer posts float to the top when you open your category and you can slide back to older ones until you catch up on what you've missed.

All in all, I'm relatively pleased. If I had to be shoved forward technologically, at least I wound up in a pretty good site. That tech support is incredible.