The first thing that I was frantically searching for was a way to sort the subscriptions alphabetically in Google Reader. After searching through all settings and various Internet search engines I came up with nothing. Yes, that’s right. There is no way to sort the subscriptions automatically in Google Reader.

The only thing that you can do is drag and drop them around so that they are listed in alphabetical order. Imagine doing that with 200+ RSS News Feeds. That would take a while. Most users probably import their first batch of RSS News Feeds using an OPML file which could be sorted alphabetically.

Every new entry to Google Reader on the other hand is added at the bottom after each folder and existing subscription which means it has to be manually dragged and dropped into the right location.

I was recently looking for one specific feed that I subscribed to and it took me almost a minute to locate it because the subscribed feeds could not be sorted properly.

Exporting and importing the RSS News Feeds does not help either unless they would be imported into an application that provides access to a “sort” function that can sort the feeds alphabetically. That would on the other hand be much work and something that had to be done regularly.

The first thing I did was to backup my opml information at Netvibes. These file contains information about all feeds that I’m subscribed to. The option was a bit hidden in Netvibes, you find it in the profile section under Feeds. Then I realized that Firefox had no option to import an opml file directly which meant I had to find an add-on that would import the opml file for me.

OPML Support is an add-on for Firefox that adds this functionality to the Bookmarks Manager. It provides an export and import option for opml files. This made it easy to transfer my RSS feeds from Netvibes into Firefox Live Bookmarks giving me the opportunity to finally test the RSS reader add-on Brief for Firefox.

I went to Feedburner which tracks the Ghacks feed and displays the amount of subscribers and which services they use to read my feed. Last Friday was the last normal day with 588 readers who have been using Netvibes to read my feed. Then on Saturday that figure took a first dive to 410 readers and to 1 on Sunday. Monday continued that trend with another single Netvibes reader on that day and I’m waiting for today’s statistics to see if they have changed.

This time however the issue is not with Feedburner but with Netvibes. They are currently – or have – migrated their system to new servers and a blog post by Tariq Krim at Netvibes sheds some light into the darkness:

During the upgrade, you may encounter feedburner stats issues, but everything should be fixed shortly when the migration is completed.

So, Netvibes stats have not been reported correctly to Feedburner during the last three days and the cause for this has been the Netvibes server migration.

Yesterday everything was working fine and today it’s messed up. I even tried changing the theme but this did not help either. Can this be related to a Firefox extension that I did install recently or is this a general error on the Netvibes website that is affecting all Firefox users ?

I was able to confirm that it is not extension related because I did start Firefox without add-ons and the display problem was still in existance. Opera for example is working fine which I tried afterwards.

Does not look pretty, uh ? It’s irritating as well which is the worst part. Do you use Netvibes and have the same problem ?

Short time ago I found a nice online RSS aggregator called Rootly. Important thing is that you can customize your account very well. You can use their feed presets or even better insert your own feed addresses and create unique tabs. Rootly then collects all the news for you and displays them in a very clean and well styled interface.

You can choose in which tab your news will appear and the order of tabs too. I appreciate that this service mixes all news together and displays them on one page instead of dividing the feeds according to their source. I hope that in the future they’ll add at least one more option – the possibility to choose how many news you want to display on a single page.

And the best thing at the end – Rootly supports OpenID (read previous article for more info on that). Actually, when I found the service few weeks ago, I had some serious problems with logging in using OpenID among other minor troubles but at this time it looks like everything works fine already.

Rootly is not really an alternative if you are already using Netvibes for instance as your news aggregator. I’m basically using it at work because Netvibes has been banned there while Rootly has not. The interface of Rootly is not that intuitive and it takes a step longer to perform actions. Adding feeds for instance has to be done on a separate page while you can add them on the fly so to speak in Netvibes.

15 feeds with the latest seven articles can be displayed on my screen without scrolling using Netvibes and I was a little bit disappointed when I saw how Google Reader handled the feeds. Google Reader does not use tabs but folders to sort feeds. Folders and Feeds are displayed on the left pane which does not have much space if you keep the folders expanded all the time. (a scroll bar appears if you reach the bottom, happens after about 20 feeds and 5 folders)

About 25 feeds are displayed in List mode in the main window of Google Reader, if you have more you have to scroll again. Expanded mode displays the content of every feed on a single page just like Google Groups displays the content of the discussion.

Reducing the text size in Firefox makes everything more accessible, does anyone know if there is a firefox add-on to customize the text size on certain pages and leave the default size for the rest ? I don’t like the way Google Reader displays the feeds, I tend to get a great overview in Netvibes when I access it. I see which site has updated articles. In Google Reader I have to take a look at the left pane and see if there are new feeds (and probably scroll down to the feeds that are of interest) or take a look at all updated feeds of a certain folder to find the ones that are of interest.

Google Reader on the other hand pulls more than the maximum of ten feeds from a website. Netvibes has a maximum of ten feeds that are pulled from a new source, Google Reader pulls about 180 at the first time and if you scroll down to the last ones it pulls more from that site.

Google Reader feels a little bit faster than Netvibes, not enough to make it a significant advantage though. Both Google Reader and Netvibes make it possible to import feeds from an OPML file and both do not offer the feature to create one Netvibes does not offer a way to export one I was not able to find the option in Netvibes. I had to manually enter all feeds from Netvibes into Google Reader. Took a while as you can guess.

My conclusion is that I will stick with Netvibes for now and wait until Google changes the arrangement of feeds on their site. I don’t want to scroll to read feeds which is the greatest disadvantage of Google Reader at the moment.