Google Summer of Code Swag

Hmm what is this mysterious package?

It's my Google Summer of Code T-Shirt! That feeling you're having - pure jealousy.

Google Reader Impressions

I've been using a Firefox plugin, Sage, to manage and read all of my feeds the past few months. It was handy because it worked right inside Firefox and at the time there were no "Live Bookmarks". Beyond that, I never found a desktop feedreader (on Win XP) that actually worked. Sage has served me all right for the past few months but, unfortunately, it has left me wanting more recently. When I tell it to update the feeds, it seems to handpick which feeds it actually will report as new. So while it may tell me three of the feeds have new entries, perhaps 13 actually do. I've severely limited my cache in Firefox and cleared it out to see if that helped at all, but it hasn't. Perhaps it's not even Sage's fault - maybe the corporation I work for does some sort of caching in the middle. I don't know - but I do know that I want my feeds piping hot and fresh, and not to miss any of the new entries (otherwise, why would I have subscribed?).

So I finally gave in and moved another piece of my life into the Borg / Google experience and am trying out Google Reader. The first thing I did was export my feeds from Sage as OPML and import them into Google. It worked like a charm and picked up my own folder hierarchy as the "labels" to use. Then I started playing around in the "Your Subscriptions" section checking out the feeds entries manually. Works pretty good. So I click the Home button to see what that displays. It's showing me two new entries, one from SvN and one from Loud Thinking. I guess that's all right, but what about all the other entries? How does it choose which ones are displayed on my "Home"? One is from November 4th, today, and the other from November 2nd. So I click "Read items", because I'd like to read my new items. It shows the same two from my "Home". So I go into "Your subscriptions" and look at other items from feeds manually. Great. Works well. I decide to try "Read Items" again. Aha! Tricked by the double-meaning of "read" again (I made this mistake a few times in GMail), "Read Items" means "items I have read already", not "read my new items".

I tried checking "Home" again a few times and it seems that occasionally a new item will pop up, but it's not new in the sense that the entry is brand new, it's just newly added to that page. So I'm still at a loss for what "Home" is supposed to be. Any ideas? Beyond that, the UI is minimal and it did a great job importing my feeds wight away. I'll keep plugging away with it for a few days to see if it will eventually actually give me a nice view of what's new and unread since I last checked on "Home". That's really the most important feature, so I'm assuming that must be there - Google's not that dense.