Thursday, May 24, 2012

Whisk(e)y on the internet

UPDATE APRIL 2013
Google Reader is getting discontinued in near near future. I recommend you try the new Google Chrome app named NewsSquares which is the follow up to FeedSquares and actually makes it easier if you want to follow a lot of (whisky)blogs. If you, like me have used Google Reader + Feedsqaures before, you can easily transfer what you follow to NewsSquares
Update July 2013. Google Reader is now discontinued. Long live NewsSquares :-)

I often hear people say, that there is a lot of whisky blogs and similar sites out there, and it's too hard to keep track and read all of them and they can't really be troubled to follow them

"I just read Whiskyfun and Malt Advocate" is a sentence (or similar) I often heard in the past. Well, I honestly think the whiskyworld has more to offer, than just a handful sites like the two mentioned.

A good whisky site needs 3 things first of all

1. Well written
2. Knowledgable
3. Activity

I actually follow around 60 blogs and the number is raising. I enjoy reading blogs from all over the world. I even sometimes sidetracks to cocktailblogs (I had a great input from one at my recent James Bond post here)

How is that possible ? For a start I have a lot of them feeding on my facebook and twitter profile, which can be handy. But it's not perfect. The way for me to easy track all these sites is to use some help from google. First I use google chrome and NewsSquares

NewsSquares can be found HERE


NewsSquares displays all blogs, that you have added, as a grid of squares, where it's very easy to keep updated with new posts and get access to added websites and their recent posts.

NewsSquares will appear as an icon when you open a new Chrome page. If you go the NewsSquares' Options you can set it up to your likings, like adding an "unread counter" on the icons which is very handy or setting NewsSquares up as "Home Page". You can set NewsSquares up to follow many places, not just regular blogs.

I highly recommend NewSsquares to anyone who likes to follow the fast world of online whisky :-)

Kind regards and have fun




3 comments:

  1. Steffen, first, thanks so much for inclusion on your link list. I've respected your take on the various forums and your blog for some time, so it's a treat.

    One app I use on my phone, iPad and computer that I find really great at managing RSS in conjunction with Google Reader is Reeder. I think it's mac only but it's a very quick, clean interface for Google Reader. You can see what's new by blog or just an aggregate view of everything new. There's a quick preview so you can get a sense if something's worth reading. It's also easy to quickly mark an individual blog as reviewed through the Reeder interface.

    It definitely helped make my consumption of blogs and news feeds a lot more efficient and it's worth a look for Mac users.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Steffen, thanks so much for the tip, this is exactly what I needed! As the number of blogs I follow had grown past 30 I was getting really tired of blindly checking for updates. I love FeedSquares! What a time saver! The only downside is that now, as with email, it tells me the number of new posts so I am tempted to read them right away... :) I might have to disable that feature.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Florin, thanks for the nice words

    At least when you press a particular blog you see a list of the headlines :-)

    Steffen

    ReplyDelete