Google Reader, again (UPDATED)

It's been a long time since I last tried using Google Reader to keep track of news and blogs. There have been a lot of new features added since then, so I'm going to give it a go once more.

I imported all my feeds in from Bloglines, and the first thing I noticed is that Reader still timestamps items by when it reads them, not by the post time given in the feed. Since Reader only goes out to check your feeds intermittently, you end up with "clumps" of items posted between checks that are all given the same date and time. There's a great post about why this is bad here.

This was one of the reasons it didn't work out for me last time; hopefully it either doesn't bother me this time or the behavior is fixed to work more intelligently. Anyway, here goes...

UPDATE: I've already seen that the behavior has indeed been fixed to work more intelligently. The issue raised in the post I linked to above has been resolved, keeping items in the correct order even when a group is all grabbed at the same time. However, it would still be nice to see items timestamped with the actual <pubDate> from the feed and not Google's "scrape time." The only other issue I had in previous Reader attempts was seeing how it treats feed items that have updated or changed. There doesn't seem to be a per-feed setting for whether to show the item again when there's a new version (there is in Bloglines, which is a feature I really liked), so I'm still not *quite* sure whether Reader will stick with me this time.

Google Reader

P.S. Mihai Parparita, this one's for you.