Stex Toys

I’ve been a long time fan of the power given to a websites readers by RSS. Allowing you to keep tabs on what is being posts or written on a site without having to actually visit the site directly unless you want to read the full article. And despite finding many clients for managing my ever growing list of interesting sources I’ve always geared back to using Google Reader for it’s ultimate portability and simplistic, in a user friendly way, interface.

Today however I came across a Firefox plugin that takes things a little bit further, and better still it doesn’t set about replacing Google Reader, but on building upon it. That’s not to say you need to be a Google Reader user to make use of this tool, but if you do not only will your feeds be synchronised with it, but even your read count, stars and shares are all there too.

But the real nice thing about this plugin is it’s presentation. Replicating that of a well designed print magazine and presenting it on your monitor screen. Now you could argue that print media is on the way out in many cases, so why take your design from them? Well they’ve been working with a human ‘interface’ for years now, finding out the best blend of text sizes, colour schemes and layouts. Sure there’s room for individuality to enter into the equation but the basics are well laid down. And Feely clearly takes it’s design from these. It that familiar design that really catches my attention. I feel I already know how to use this tool, it feels like home.

The range of preferences on offer is extensive, and far too numerous for me to go through here. But some of my favourite parts are being able to still share through Google’s shared items; directly tweet from the interface; the three overview modes of Cover, Latest & Digest; retrieving of related Twitter and YouTube links.

For anyone who makes good use of RSS I fully recommend you check this out over at Feedly.com and see what you think. I’ve even taken to recreating all my feed tags on Google to better suit this new design ethic, abandoning the scheme that has served me well for many months now as mentioned here. Of course this is all still new to me, and it could all just be first day fanboyism but every so often, that turns up a quality item.