Skimr, A Minimalternative To Google Reader

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Looking for an alternative to Google Reader? The might I suggest Skimr, a rather minimal web app which will let you read your feeds right there in the browser. It shows your feeds in a big, bright and beautiful single-column list, and when you open a feed it shows you the articles in a similarly cruft-free view.

It’s just about perfect, as long as you don’t have more than a few feeds.

Skimr lets you import an OPML file of your feeds, which you can get out of Google Reader by following the rather convoluted Takeout process (and even then, the result is an XML file hidden in a folder, although Skimr will read it just fine).

Once loaded (or once you have added sites one-by-one) you can browse. The problem is that your feeds are all in one giant frickin’ column, arranged in alphabetical order. Did you have your Google Reader feeds organized into folders? You won’t see them here, but the names of the feeds are prefixed with the name of the folder they were in, which – thanks to the alphabetization – keeps them together in groups.

For low-traffic use, then, Skimr is fine. But for powering through lots of news (arguably the main use of a dedicated RSS reader) it’s not nearly up to the task. Still, being web-based it will always be up-to-date even if you read from various different devices.

I rely heavily on RSS to bring you all the day’s news, and I’m worried about what will happen when GR shuts down in a few months. Hopefully my favorite app, Mr.Reader will sort something out. Otherwise it’s back to the dark days of non-synced feeds. On the desktop!

Source: Skimr

Thanks: Petr!

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