Mostly good things on switching to Google Reader today.  I love the UI, it's very clean, I love the keyboard shortcuts, and I super love the popup lightbox style help if I forget a shortcut.  Managing subscriptions is a little clunky yet, i'm used to everything being at the click of a context menu item, but on the other hand, the "Subscribe" bookmarklet they have is superb, and overall, Google Reader integrates with my RSS consumption habits way better than RSSBandit did.

For instance, I used to go through my feeds, anything I wanted to bookmark or look further into got opened in the browser, and often I'd be led to new blogs to subscribe to, which became a synch hassle of course on different pc's and I had a special del.icio.us tag called AddToRSSBandit just to handle this issue.  Now though, if I want to read more, I just hit "v" to open it in a new tab, and if I want to add something's feed to my reader, I just hit the bookmarklet.  Everything is in the browser.

The 1 LOL of the night is that I suddenly lost many of my keyboard shortcuts.  As in, they weren't working.  I refreshed the page, no dice, I closed the other tabs, no dice, I restarted the browser, no dice.  Then I noticed that the "shift" hotkeys were working.  the non-shift ones weren't.  That seemed odd.  Then I tried to type a google search to see what was wrong, saw that caps lock is on (my keyboard doesn't have a visual indicator of this) and when I turned off caps lock...problem solved.  Kind of funny.  Not sure why they aren't allowing for the caps versions of the shortcuts.  I thought maybe it was to allow the sharing of letters in both states (such as j/k being next/prev item, and shift+j/k being next/prev feed) but were it that simple then capslocked j/k should have behaved like shift j/k and it wasn't.  So...whatever.  Memo to self:  shortcuts stop working = check caps lock.

Overall though, only my first day using Google Reader, and the learning curve is way low.  I think i'll stick with it.  4/5 stars.