Google Reader

One of the fun things about getting a steady job a while back was being able to jump into the world of RSS feeds, which I'd been hearing about for a while but didn't have the chance to take advantage of. I got myself going with Thunderbird, which has an RSS reader built in, and found it to be a great way to keep track of lots of things (blogs, new Onion articles, sports scores, etc) without having to keep checking bookmarks every so often. But Thunderbird's been running sluggishly lately so I gave Google Reader a spin this past week.

It has truly surpassed my expectations as it works great, is easy to use and doesn't require any more hard-drive space as it's just a Java-based website. It works just as well on the Win98 machine I have to use at work as it does on XP here at Casa de Cabra. On the downside, it doesn't automatically save feed items (such as blog posts) to your hard drive. I'm not finding this to be a huge downside as I was keeping way too much crap in Thunderbird and Google saves everything, anyway...