WANTED: Replacement Feed Aggregator [UPDATED]

 

I found out today that my beloved Bloglines will officially shut down on October 1, 2010. This saddens me. I’ve been using Bloglines for at least 5 years now, if not longer. I’ve tried using Google Reader but I don’t like how it forces you to add every blog you follow into your reader. I tried creating folders and I just can’t get it to work. With Bloglines, I had a folder for Authors, Barnes & Noble updates, Bookworms (aka book bloggers), Kindle, and a Miscellaneous folder for everything else. What am I going to do now? I’m on the hunt for a replacement web-based feed aggregator and would like to get some suggestions.

How do you stay up to date with the blogs you like to read? Do you use a web-based feed aggregator (i.e. Bloglines (R.I.P.) or Google Reader)? If so, which one do you use? What do you like about the one you use?

UPDATED 9/10/2010 5:16 pm

I gave Feed Demon a try and to be honest, I didn’t like it. It’s a download that’s constantly running in the background with messages popping up in my lower right hand screen alerting me to new posts. I’m sure there’s a way to disable the pop ups but I’m looking for a web-based feed aggregator. I like to be able to go to the feed aggregator when I’m good and ready, not have it come get me.

So, I caved and decided to give Google Reader a second chance. Carrie from Carrie Actually was kind enough to let me know what I needed to do to not have the blogs I follow show up in my subscriptions. I followed her instructions and it worked. The next thing I did was clear out all the old subscriptions I had in Google Reader – there were 664 of them. Once I had a clean slate, I imported my feeds from Bloglines. Now I have the pleasure (NOT!) of going through 1000+ feeds to weed out the old posts from the new. Not fun.

Now that I’m going through my feeds and getting familiar with Google Reader , I’ve come across a few questions that I’m hoping someone can help me out with:

• Once I’ve added a “star” to a post, how do I look at it again? Where do all my starred posts go? I thought there was a “star” folder somewhere but I don’t see it..?
• If you personally use Google Reader, do you sort by newest or by oldest? Or are you special and sort by “magic”? (Someone, please explain that to me.) I have it sorting by newest for now but would like to change it sort by oldest once I go through all my feeds. I like being able to read my feeds in the order that they were posted. But I’m worried that if I do sort by oldest first, that Google Reader will go back farther than I really need to go…am I correct?
• I don’t understand the whole “followers” thing. In the left column, there’s a message telling me that I have “16 new followers”. What is that? Why do these people want to follow me on Google Reader? How did they find me?

Do you know of any Google Reader tips/tricks/hacks that you would like to share?