In my previous post I asked what Blogs do you read?
I tend to read quite a few. It’s a great way to keep track of all the changes in the Web Promotion world as well as anything else that interests me.
However I’ve been driven nuts recently by Google Reader. For some unexplained reason it just won’t load properly and I wasn’t able to keep track of new blogs posts.
So I started to look for something else to track my blogs and I’ve found a really neat free tool.
Introducing Alertbear from Square Eight.
This tool is great. It sits quietly on my desktop and every so often it checks with the various RSS feeds I have set up and lets me know if there is anything new to look at.
Here’s a quote from the creators of Alertbear.
We believe that RSS should be usable by anyone. We also believe that RSS is not email, feeds should simply wash by, commonly called the “river of news”. Alertbear takes both of these concepts and introduces The Stack
I have to say I agree with them (I’ll explain their “Stack” in a moment).
There are a couple of clever features that really make this tool stand out for me.
1) I can colour code the feeds that I am watching so that I can see at a glance what the feed is about and decide whether I am going to read it now or later.
2) I can set the timer to check feeds every so often. So if I a have my head down working on something and I don’t really want to be disturbed I will set the reader to check every couple of hours. Otherwise I set it to check every 30 minutes.
3) The reader sits quietly in the bottom of my screen and a quick right click of my mouse will hide it away.
4) It can play a sound when one of the feeds I am watching has been updated.
One of the coolest things about it is the introduction is what they call the Stack.
As you can see in the image here, the posts are stacked up and all I need do to see a post is click on the item in the stack. What’s more because the stack only shows the headlines for each feed, I can very quickly check new feeds to see if I am interested enough to read now or later (or never!).
Setting the stack to only show unread posts also helps keep the stack tidy.
You can also set how many items the stack will show. Mine is set to four as you can see here.
Once I have cleared one item any new posts waiting to enter the stack will do so.
It’s great to finally find a simple tool that delivers exactly what’s needed without loads of additional features chewing up your computers memory or just getting in your way.
Highly recommended.
