If you’ve been stuck under a volcano, without internet access, let me refresh you:

Google is shutting down Reader. So, like everybody else who uses it, your intrepid blogger is looking for a replacement. We are, however, having trouble finding things. Particularly ones with offline support.

We smacked down Feedly and The Old Reader, on the basis of a lack of offline support. But they seem to be better than NewsBlur, which has just enough offline support to make you feel properly ripped off by their subscription fees and lack of a decent user experience.

So we have moved on to netvibes. Which I’m not sure how to spell properly. If you go to the site, your tab will read “Netvibes”, but your screen will say “netvibes”, with “net” in white and “vibes” in green. It’s all very confusing.

There’s one point down.

Netvibes almost got a short, one line review, thanks to not having an app (like Old Reader), but their FAQ says this:

The version for smartphones is available on iPad, iPhone and Android. It has a reader view, an offline mode…

Offline mode? How does that work?

Ah. It doesn’t.

Next?

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you have probably heard recently that Google Reader is shutting down. And if you’re anything like our blogger, you’re a heavy user of Google Reader, and in search of alternatives.

You’re in luck though. Every single website on the Internet is telling you about the top alternatives. Every. Single. One.

They generally look like this one by Lifehacker, who have probably published another dozen articles almost exactly like this since Google’s announcement, and will probably publish a dozen more before Google shuts down Reader on July 1st.

Here at the Big Bad Blog, we aren’t going to make a list. But we do need to find ourselves a new RSS reader. It has to sync between machines. And it has to have an app that handles offline reading.

That’s it. Nothing too fancy.

So we’re combing through all these recommendations, and actually trying them out. After a few days, each one will get its own post here on the Big Bad Blog, and we’ll see how it compares against the frontrunner. Once we have a potential replacement.

First up …

Feedly

Feedly seems to appear on every list that’s out there. And no wonder – it’s pretty sweet.

• It syncs a single account across all your devices.
• It’s pretty.
• You can import your Google Reader feeds with a single click.
• It’s pretty.
• They have a no-effort solution for handling the closure of Google Reader.
• Have we mentioned that it’s pretty?

The Android app is also quite nice — one of the best RSS reader apps I’ve used. It’s not just gorgeous, but intuitive, and looks like it has plenty of additional options to help organise your feeds.

But.

Before I got to configuring these, I got on the tube to come home this afternoon, and this popped up:

Seriously, feedly? No offline support?

I checked the available settings. Nothing.

No offline support is simply a dealbreaker. The internet is not available on the London Underground. Nor is it available on airplanes. And while it’s available in foreign countries, it’s really damn expensive through a phone.

Offline support, Feedly. Offline support.

What’s next?

The Old Reader was going to be next, as I had seen various recommendations, but not only does their mobile app not include offline support – it does not even exist.

So tomorrow will be Newsblur.

Newsblur charge a subscription fee, so will have to knock the socks off the competition, but all these services are certain to be experiencing scaling issues from the influx of people seeking an alternative to Google — a combination of deterrent (ie, cost) and cash influx from new users is certain to help that.

So I have high hopes, Newsblur. Don’t disappoint. I need a frontrunner.

The first half of this week was tough. Things broke. As they are purported to, they broke in threes.

last.fm

As many denizens of the Internet might know, last.fm broke early in the week.

Once upon a time, this would be something I might not have even noticed, but since last year’s Android Music Adventure experiment, I have become quite the last.fm enthusiast. I now use the service to track all the music I listen to, to discover new music (which is mostly music that has somehow gone missing from my library in the move from tape to CD to MP3), to listen to music at work, and to keep track of statistics on what I listen to.

Yes, I like statistics.

At the end of the day, I can listen to music using my phone or the library on my home computer (which is what I mostly do anyways). But it broke. Which sucked.

giffgaff

Of course, having last.fm broken doesn’t necessarily matter if you can’t connect to it. And when I was mobile, I couldn’t connect to it.

Why? Giffgaff went down.

That isn’t exactly fair, of course — giffgaff is a “virtual” mobile network, meaning it runs on another company’s hardware. And that company, O2, had a major network crash, which lasted for approximately 25 hours.

The phone

Of course, having your mobile network broken doesn’t mean much if your phone is not working. And mine has developed a fault.

The down volume button doesn’t work.

If this sounds like a small problem, it’s because it should be. But for some reason, this triggers my phone to go into Safe Mode in Android Ice Cream Sandwich. There seems to be no way around it. I’ve tried a stock ROM, and all sorts of other ROMs. None of them work.

What does work is going back to Gingerbread. But after half a year of using Ice Cream Sandwich, it feels like being back in the stone age — I have grown accustomed to many of the Ice Cream Sandwich features.

The plan today is to stick with Gingerbread until Jelly Bean is available for my phone — hopefully later this month. Then hope that Jelly Bean will play nice with slightly broken hardware.

If it doesn’t, then I will have a dilemma: I want my next phone to be compatible with a 4G network in the UK, but those don’t exist yet. Do I limp along with Gingerbread until then? Or upgrade my phone early?

And if I upgrade, to what?

My first thought was the Motorola Atrix HD. I’ve like Motorola phones in the past.

But for some reason, Motorola — who are owned by Google — lock down their Android phones and don’t ship with the latest version of the Operating System. On the other hand, Google branded phones by Samsung (who I no longer trust to build robust hardware) are easy to root.

Colour me confused.

In any case, I apologize for missing your call this week.

It’s that time of year, again — time to take a look back at 2011, and see what you liked most about the Big Bad Blog.

How can we tell? We use a complex scoring system which tracks links back to the Big Bad Blog, comments made, and pageviews. Maybe not that complicated. However we came up with the list — and truth be told, even we are not entirely sure — this is it:

5: Google Plus: A first look

We received an early invitation to the new Social Network on the block, and dutifully gave our first impressions of it — and they were positive impressions, indeed.

While an update of those impressions are overdue — first impressions, while important, are not necessarily final opinions — this blogger still feels that Google Plus has the potential to be the best of the available networks, but it still has some way to go before it arrives there.

4: Character creation and alignment

The roleplaying area of the blog has taken a big backseat this year. While the generally haphazard update schedule has reduced the amount of content published, of all types, the roleplaying section has had to address a second deficiency: I stopped running my D&D game.

Most of the content I produced was the result of running a game myself — a weekly article was easy when I was introducing myself to the fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game. Running a game once a month was enough to provide ongoing monthly articles — ideas or actions would arise in planning or playing that were comment-worthy.

But a baby makes for little playing time, nevermind planning time, and the game only managed one session after Maggie’s birth in 2010 to prove itself to be too much work. It went on hiatus, and my impression now is that it is a permanent one.

Since then, I have been thinking about my next game, which will be of the more old skool D&D bent. Although actual game development has been minimal this year — maybe it will get off its feet in 2012 — I read something that triggered ideas about alignment, in terms of the next game, and voila. A popular D&D blog post.

If scheduling permits progress towards running this new game next year — by no means a necessity — we should see plenty of roleplaying goodness on the Big Bad Blog next year.

Otherwise? The 2012 edition might not have a roleplaying entry.

3: Bringing down the meme: Demotivationals

It seems that every year, I get excited about a meme. And then soon in the new year, I get tired of the meme and write about it.

In 2009/10 it was the FAIL meme. In 2010/11, it was the demotivational.

Next year? No idea. I sadly feel as though I’m not amused by any current memes — it could be the end of a Big Bad Blog tradition.

This particular blog entry makes me quite proud: the comments tend to be people stopping in to tell me that I’m unfunny or stupid. This, as you may be aware, is an indicator of blog excellence.

2: Because you’re all horny for Felicia Day

It has long been noted that Felicia Day nude, Felicia Day naked, and their ilk are popular search terms, when it comes to finding the Big Bad Blog, sending over 100 people our way on an average day.

The traffic from these search terms seemed to be spiking over the summer, when I saw this photo on Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr thingy. (I always call then “Tumblr thingies”. Calling it “so-and-so’s Tumblr” seems wrong. Calling it a “Tumblr blog”, also wrong. What to do?)

The forces of Google meant that I had to write something including that photo.

And the popularity of the search term guaranteed its place here.

1: Twitter to Facebook not working

Back in February, I noticed that my tweets had stopped automatically updating my Facebook page.

This was a concern — I disliked, and continue to dislike, interacting with Facebook directly. But I like all the people on Facebook (also known as “all the people”) to be able to follow me, if they so wish.

So … importation.

It had, for whatever reason, stopped working. So I did what one does in these situations, and starting to try to figure out how to fix it.

Once fixed, I figured that I would post the solution, as it was neither easy to find nor immediately evident. Mine was apparently well-indexed on Google, as it prompted plenty of re-tweets, Facebook likes and (for this blog) a healthy number of comments.

A bit boring, maybe, compared to previous year’s number ones, but it’s nice to be helpful sometimes.