GRUML - gReader linking software

I like Google Reader for my RSS feeds. I'm well aware there are a host of other choices, but gReader works nicely for me in all the circumstances I use it in. Until recently I used, very happily, a Fluid SSB so I had an application that just looked at that site and displayed a badge if there were new feeds to read.

Gruml, pictured to the right, made me change that. In one sense it doesn't do a lot more for me than the SSB did. It sits in my dock, it displays a badge for the number of items that remain to be read. It lets me share things, make them as unread, email them etc. All good stuff, and all stuff that the SSB did. It lets me open articles in a new browser tab - you can set your SSB to do that too, although it's rather denying the nature of the beast. You can see a picture of an open tab in the lower picture.

It adds a batch of tools that, to be honest, I don't use - but you may. You can, for example, automatically ping, twitter, digg, StumbleUpon etc. an article. There is a list of twelve of them at the moment, and easy to remember keyboard shortcuts too. Shift-F to send to Facebook for example, Shift-T to tweet it.

So what made me change? Well the main thing is that lovely 3-column layout. (You can choose a 2 column with an over-and-under display on the right too if you're on a narrower browser or just prefer that structure. Steve Jobs seems to, if you look at how tricky it is to make mail a 3-column item.) I can easily see all my feeds left to read so I can cherry pick if I only have a couple of minutes (or if I turn off 'view only unread' to go back to an old post) and still read the article easily, then hop on to the next feed and read that.


One thing that all of this has made me realise - I am increasingly likely to dump feeds that routinely expect me to click through to read them in full. I'm not sure that's really a change in behaviour on my part just one thrown into prominence by the change in my reader and the subsequent change in reading habits. That ability to open feeds in a new tab I use for a small number of teased pages - I RSS a story site for example that puts up the title and categories of the new stories only but the stories are rarely ones I want to read right now, so I'm happy to open a tab and read them at a more appropriate time - and I also use it for non-teased pages that I want to come back to - for example I subscribe to TED Talks and they inconveniently always drop a new talk on me in the middle of class. I can skim RSSes in class whilst the students are thinking, and thanks to this I can open up a new tab, watch it at my leisure. I do something similar for CSS Tricks too - there is often a lot of information and/or a video in the feed that I want to come back to later, without fuss. Maybe I should look into ReadItLater but banging it out into a new tab does the same trick and I will go back to Gruml and see new feeds so I suspect it's easier to then click on the tabs when I have the time.

Well worth a look in my opinion.