About 13,000 people subscribe to the Cyclelicious RSS feed. 85% of you use Google Reader to follow that feed.
As you no doubt have heard, Google announced Reader will go away Real Soon Now. If you don’t want to bother with setting up another RSS feed reader, you can sign up for an emailed daily digest of Cyclelicioius content.
Other options for following Cyclelicious include Twitter and Facebook. I have a personal Google Plus page too, but right now I don’t post many links to Cyclelicious there. That may change after Google Reader goes away.
About 30% of you reading Cyclelicious do so in a feed reader such as Google Reader. One third of you link through to to the site, which results in about 10% of the “hits” to Cyclelicious. Organic search via Google, Yahoo and Bing still constitutes the biggest portion of my audience, while social networking sites are the next largest category. Twitter is by far the largest single social media source of traffic to Cyclelicious, followed by Facebook, Reddit, Google+, and StumbleUpon.
I’m a heavy user of Google Reader, so if you have suggestions to help me in my transition, I’m all ears. Let me know how you plan to keep up with your blog reading.
I discovered feedly.com today in my search to replace Google reader. It has a sign in option for Google reader accounts as well as plugins for FireFox and Chrome. It seems a little easier to organize than reader with a few exceptions…
I discovered feedly today too. It seems to be working pretty well. I still need to figure some stuff out, but I think it will work.
Same here – I get basically the same functionality with feedly as I do with GR and it looks a little better – took some time to learn all the options and get it looking right (i.e. titles instead of panels/etc) – but apparently it is equivalent other than the discovery feature is different (I rarely used it anyway).
I’m switching to The Old Reader (http://theoldreader.com/). It was started by former Googlers after Google killed the social aspects of Reader. It’s fast and attractive and you can import your Reader feeds (although imports have slowed due to massive traffic to the site).
If you run your own server, you could try Fever (http://www.feedafever.com/). It’s a one time fee of $30, which pretty much guarantees no ads. The popular iPhone app “Reeder” already supports Fever accounts.
Digg just announced that they are going to develop an RSS web application. It’s an exciting time for RSS. I like Google Reader but they basically killed all RSS development for years. Their departure from the game will be good in the long run. Here’s Digg’s blog post about the whole thing: http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader
Testing Feedly on Android – nicer look, but no ranking
“Other options for following Cyclelicious include Twitter and Facebook.” and your G+ cyclelicious page! i like g+
xxom
Hey Richard, I’m using Thunderbird for my e-mail and I’ve included RSS feeds on there as well so everything is in one place
Trying out NewsBlur and liking it so far.
http://theoldreader.com
I’m trying that out.
Thanks for all of the tips! I’m looking at Feedly now and I like what I see.
I’ve used Thunderbird in the past for RSS, but I might read my feeds on any of several different devices – tracking read vs unread and flagging articles for future action gets difficult across multiple devices. I liked Reader so much because it’s in the “cloud” as it were.
Feedly and Old Reader seem to be the leading candidates, though I’m looking forward to DIgg’s Reader. Reeder is cool but they have a lot of work to do in the next three months, since their service doesn’t work without Reader.
I thought it was strange when Netflix posted a “OSS Recipe” for a RSS Reader. Two days later, Google announces the Reader retirement. Did someone at Netflix know it was coming? Anyway, perhaps someone will turn this into reality:
http://techblog.netflix.com/2013/03/introducing-first-netflixoss-recipe-rss.html
I had no idea of Netflix’s open source endeavors. Fascinating stuff, though I don’t have any ideas of what to do with their data (yet),