As I move from Blogger to WordPress, and contemplate giving up the big G totally, do people have recs for readers and calendars (which are the only other products I use besides gmail)?

gmail, calendars and reader are keeping me stuck.

calendar - you have a lot of options actually. I used 37 signals backpack before google calendar was viable. You might want to look into that. Their free accts are decent, and even the next step up is not all that expensive.

reader is a fucking problem. I was trying to find an alternative when google fucked up the interface and when I have done is keep the acct, but read items on my phone and ipad for interface reasons.

believe it or not, I have known some people to abandon reader altogether and use twitter for the RSS needs. It isn't as crazy as it sounds. I use ifttt.com and every favorite on twitter gets sent to my pinboard and then later I read through my pinboard page and read, delete, etc. as I see fit.

I just have all my RSS feeds go to Dreamwidth. It's not the most elegant solution, and I do have some blogs I just manually look at, but...

Do you have a freemail account? I used to use Yahoo's calendaring even when I wasn't using that email address. It's been a long time since I've used it, so I'm not sure how the functionality matches up to today's Google calendar, but it's certainly serviceable.

What calendaring functions do you need?

Data entry on backpack looks easier than google. Question 1) Can you enter not just time but length that is 3/21 2pm- :30 pm? Secondly, does it have protection agasinst double posting in the same time the same calendar? so if you have entered 3/21 2pm-2:30. it wont let you enter 3/21 2:10pm - 2:20pm?

Secondly, does it have protection agasinst double posting in the same time the same calendar?

I've never seen that before. Have you used software that does it? I assume it's something you can turn off, right?

Outlook lets you turn that on. Used for a medical appointment calendar, one calendar per medical provider. YOu can see why in that context you would not want two appointments for the same doctor at the same time.

Yeah, I'm like meara here. I still need to finish up some RSS feed setup.

And while we're talking Google abandonment, let me self-pimp a moment. If you want to leave the search engine entirely, you could start using

Google cut Liese off.

Liese, very mysterious.

Mind you I don;t neccesarily want to abandon google. But I hate the "let us show you the results you got in previous searchs" thing. If I do a google search must of the time i'm looking for info not confirmation of my prejudices.