Counting Down the Days Until Google Reader Dies

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I received a tweet yesterday asking me what I did to replace my beloved Google Reader, which ascends to tech heaven on July 1. Answer: After a vast amount of detailed research, I switched to NewsBlur. OK, maybe it wasn’t a vast amount. Basically, Austin Frakt said it worked pretty well, and most of the other options wouldn’t work for me (they were Mac only, Firefox only, etc. etc.), so I made the switch.

NewsBlur works pretty well. It has a few minor drawbacks and a few minor improvements over Google Reader, plus one major drawback and one major improvement. The big drawback is its lack of search. It’s no surprise that Google would excel at this, and it was a feature I used all the time since I routinely forget where I’ve seen things. The big improvement is that it extracts full posts even from partial feeds, which is really nice. Overall, though, it works well enough that I anted up the $24 subscription fee, in hopes that it will stay around for a while.

And as long as we’re talking tech, here are a couple of questions for you. First, is there any way to buy a Kindle e-book from Amazon UK? For reasons almost certainly due to unfathomable publisher politics of some kind, the book I want isn’t available in the U.S. in electronic form. Since I work from a computer with an American IP address, and my Amazon account is linked to an address in California, I’m guessing this is basically impossible. But I’m open to suggestions.

Second, last night my mother got an iPad. Hooray! But it doesn’t work. Boo! This means a trip to the Genius Bar, I suppose, but I have a lot of geniuses who read this blog, so I’ll try you first. Here’s what happens: when I connect it to my Wi-Fi network, it works for about five or ten seconds and then loses the connection. If I forget the network and reconnect, it works again for about five or ten seconds. Elsewhere in my house, I have two iPhones, another iPad, and an Android tablet that all connect fine (and stay connected). Anybody have a clue what’s going on?

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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