I’ve tried lots of offline RSS readers over the years and they just don’t feel as comfortable as the online ones. After sticking with Bloglines for the longest time (with the odd foray over to Rojo to discover it was still dog slow), I’ve been giving Google Reader a whirl for the past few weeks. So far, I’m very impressed and it does everything I need in a reader.

In general use, the only thing I don’t like is the delay when I scroll to the bottom as it auto-loads the next twenty stories. Surely the point of AJAX is that it is asynchronous? Could they not load when I am approaching the end? It just feels like stuttering scrolling at the moment. Not awful but annoying.

However, it does have one awful feature which is driving me nuts. When I subscribe to a new feed, it does not ask me for a tag/folder for it (and why do they mix and match those two terms?). So I end up with a bunch of subscriptions down the end which are uncategorised. I go into the “manage subscriptions” page and there is no way to display just the untagged feeds so I can tag them. I can select them but so what, I don’t want to tag them all the same way. I can filter by tag but they don’t have a tag and neither “none” “null” or “nuffink” works as a filter to show me untagged feeds. Are these guys only subscribed to 4 or 5 feeds so it isn’t a problem?

Christopher Carfi had a great idea which Alex Barnett covered recently where bloggers tag “support request” type posts in a particular way so that vendors can search on them and find out what problems their customers are having. I like the style suggested by Stowe Boyd e.g. support:IE7 problemsite:ulsterbank.ie. The idea would be that in many cases, the vendor suggests the tag that people use. So I have tagged this post support:GoogleReader ProblemType:tagging. Let’s see if it works.

Technorati Tags: support:GoogleReader, ProblemType:tagging, Google+Reader