Two Sites or My Love Letter to Feedly

I was really sad to hear that iGoogle was being discontinued later this year because it's been my start page for years now and I wasn't really sure how I'd live without it. As it turns out, I don't have to. After Googling "iGoogle replacement" and looking into a few alternatives that I wasn't happy with, I found Feedly.

Feedly is everything I liked about iGoogle and more. As a disclaimer: I need to mention that I didn't really use iGoogle for much more than a feed reader but for some reason (which escapes me at the moment) Google Reader didn't do everything I needed either. Back to Feedly. It's an easy to use, attractive, customizable start page. It imported all my Google Reader feeds automatically and I was able to adjust the settings and layout of the page to my preferences. It actually seamlessly integrates with Google Reader, so changes I make in Feedly are implemented in Google Reader and vice versa. It also imports my Twitter and Facebook feeds, so I can get a quick look at all of my daily sites in one compact, tidy place.

And the visual design of Feedly works nicely. The site is as minimal as possible which is perfect because it handles diverse kinds of content, and a lot of it. It has a few different options for colors and the typographic hierarchy of the articles makes the content inviting and easily scannable. I also like how Feedly presents an article (at random, it seems) as a featured item, with a larger picture and text. It makes it feel like a personalized online magazine (which it basically is).

A couple of really nice treats that Feedly has designed into their interface are a self-collapsing left-hand navigation when your browser window is small and a some nice, minimal (but intuitive) icons for the various utilities and features available. They also provide a bookmarklet for your browser to instantly subscribe to new feeds.

A couple of things that I don't like about Feedly are more in the functionality than the design. It seems a little glitchy at times, especially when I mark certain content as "Read" but then it magically returns to my feed again later. It also tends to refresh the page at inopportune times, sometimes merely losing my place on the page, but sometimes interrupting the article I'm reading or video I'm watching. These are certainly annoying but not enough (for me, at least) to ruin the experience entirely. Hopefully these are problems that they are aware of and are working to fix.

The other site that I have open automatically when I launch my browser is Designspiration, which is a great site for design inspiration (just in case the name wasn't enough of a hint). It's simple and uncluttered and filled with great work from around the world, which is exactly what I want to see when I go online.