I am a: Quirky sysadmin. Geek. Gamer. Comic fangirl. My little space, my home on the interwebs. I blog about personal stuffs, work, various coding projects, and anything else I feel like.

The last few months I have been trying out various programs, iPad apps, and online solutions for a Google Reader replacement. I’m a creature of habit, and so loved my Google Reader. I pouted and whined when I learned of its pending demise and have been looking for something to take its place. There’s TONS of posts on blogs and news sites about apps and online services to try and other replacements efforts. I’m not going to name all the ones I had tested, but I will tell you that the final decision came down between two: Feedly and Netvibes.

Feedly has some nice browser integration available, but honestly, I found Netvibes easier to maneuver and very intuitive. I can use it to easily manage my feeds.

Feedly seems to have transitioned recently to a cloud-based service — which is fine, but I’ve had trouble accessing a few “test feeds” that I was using to evaluate both of these services. Feedly has a very nice iOS and Android app. As much I love my iOS toys, I was ideally looking for something to use on my laptop first and foremost, with my iPad being an afterthought. Feedly does make it VERY easy to transition straight from Google Reader to its native reader with their “One-click Google Reader Import” functionality. You click the button, then authorize Feedly’s access to your Google account.

With Netvibes, you have to grab your archive of feeds, but that’s really easy and they provide step-by-step instructions on how to do this. Plus, everything is stored online — which is just fine for me. And I’ll be honest, I really like Netvibes’ theming functionality. I also like that I can have several different sets of feeds (called “Dashboards”), allowing me to have one for work, one for gaming, and one for all of my other interests and friends’ blogs that I follow. I use the “Reader” view (as opposed to the “Widgets” view, which is more magazine-like) and even though it’s not exactly like Google Reader’s, it’s close enough that now I prefer it to all else.

So, Netvibes won the final vote. And I am loving it. :)

What are y’all using?