screenshot of my Google Reader bringing me the hilarious October 10, 2007 installment of xkcd

Gentle reader, if you've been with kenspecke since its inception, you'll remember that when Google Reader first arrived on the scene in October 2005, I was hopelessly smitten, then dismayed to find that I couldn't select which blogs to read via my painfully constructed hierarchy, as imported from bloglines.

The disappointment was so sudden and crushing that I didn't even bother to check out the second release of GR around this time last year—until now!

Well, my baby's back, with users' folderization appropriately prioritized. Ok, fine, Google likes to think it's tagging, but you know we're really talking about folders here. But the clinching factor in my renewed GR passion is the fact that new posts won't be marked as read until you scroll past them.

I know, I know, this is old news for everyone else this side of a continuously lit-up monitor, but I literally have been ignoring all GR news since my initial disappointment and I'm still glowing with anticipation about how much more reading I'll get done now that I don't have to worry about whether or not I have time to read all 318 new items in a feed before clicking on it. You really have no idea how many times an evening I look longingly at the bold, three-digit numbers by my feeds in bloglines but decide against starting to read because (que comic irony) I don't want to miss anything.

The only thing GR is missing now is one-step search feed subscription. I still kind of resent the fact that the unsurpassed dominator of the search engine market forces me to leave its RSS aggregator to get the path to a blogsearch feed and manually subscribe instead of seamlessly incorporating blogsearch subscription.

Oh, and yes, to you nay-sayers, I did have some difficulty in clearing out my previously imported subscriptions before importing my new OPML file. The mass unsubscription process is a little buggy.