7 Google Reader Tips and Tricks
Wednesday, November 22, 2006
I love Google Reader. The end.
I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a few weeks ago, and my life has forever changed for the better. Here’s the list of tips and tricks from what I’ve discovered so far.
- Use the bookmarklet With the Google Reader iconWhen you save the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar, it doesn’t by default have an icon, because the source url is javascript. There’s a simple workaround:
- Save a bookmark to Google Reader homepage.
- Click the bookmark once to make Firefox load the icon
- Edit the bookmark, and copy/paste the javascript from the Location field in the bookmarklet into the new bookmark.
- You can also change the Name of the bookmarklet to something else to indicate that it is a bookmarklet. For instance, I use the + symbol as the Name so that I can tell the difference between the regular bookmark and the bookmarklet:
- Install the GreaseMonkey Extension for firefox.This is critical… GreaseMonkey is an awesome extension for Firefox, and is required for the next item:
- Install the GreaseMonkey Smart Subscribe scriptThe Smart Google Reader Subscribe script will tell you if the page you are on has already been added to your subscriptions. This is invaluable if you already have 250 subscriptions and can barely remember if you’ve subscribed to the page you are reading.The script will also let you subscribe to any feeds that are listed in the meta tags on the page, which is the mechanism that allows the browser to detect the feeds.When you go to a web page that has an RSS feed, you will see this icon in the upper right hand corner of the Firefox window:
If you hover your mouse over the icon, you’ll see the list of feeds that page offers. My blog only offers the main feed by default, so you’ll see this:
But if you’ve already subscribed to a feed, you will see this icon instead, with a check mark over it:
This is really useful as you start adding more and more feeds to your collection.
- Learn to use the Shortcut Keys.Navigating using the shortcut keys makes things so much simpler. Here’s a list of the easiest keys to remember, and the ones I use most:
- ga - Go to all items view.
- gs - Go to Starred Items.
- gu - Open up Ajax’y dialog to quickly select a particular feed.
- gt - Open up Ajax’y dialog to quickly select a tag
- s - Star an item
- n - Navigate to next item without opening it
- p - Navigate to previous item without opening it
- j - Open next item
- k - Open previous item
- o - Open / Close item
- r - Refresh. (I think I’ve worn out this key)
- t - Pop up dialog box letting you assign a tag to an item. Very cool.
- Shift+A - Mark all as read.
- Start Tagging Items For Later
Let’s say you are reading a post, and realize that it would make a great blog topic, but you don’t have the time right then to mess with it. Hit the t key, and pop in “toblog” into the textbox to save the item for later.Later on that day, it’s time to start blogging. Simply hit the “gt” key combination, and up pops a great little Ajax’y goodness dialog that lets you easily select the tag you are looking for:
This is most useful if you want to be able to tag a lot of items that you don’t necessarily need to read for a while. You could also use the Starred Items feature, but I tend to use that for things I actually am planning on reading thoroughly later. - Share Items With FriendsGoogle reader lets you mark items to share with your friends. You get your own custom URL and your own RSS feed of shared items.To start sharing items, just click the Share link at the bottom of the item, or hit the Shift+s key combination:
If you go to your Shared items folder, Google will give you your own custom web URL and RSS feed for these items. You can then share that with your friends.
- Share Items With Your Blog Readers
The sharing feature goes one step further… Google lets you copy and paste some javascript code into your page, and presto! Your shared items show up on your blog or web page. You can find this feature on the “Shared Items” page in Reader.Since I just moved over to this new blog, I’ll just show you a screenshot of how this looks, instead of a live demo. (still have to get things in order here)
There’s a bunch of color schemes you can choose from, so don’t worry about the drab colors…
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November 22nd, 2006 at 5:44 am
very nice find! :)
just got google reader and added it to my google homepage. looks like i’ll have to try out the greasemonkey extension in firefox this weekend.
i admit it, i think i’m a google-fanboy too! hahah..
November 22nd, 2006 at 6:48 am
Very nice hints. I’ve still been using blogbridge and feeddemon. For some reason I can bring myself to use a web only feed reader.
November 22nd, 2006 at 7:52 am
Love the Bookmarklet hack - briliant!
Now I can add a favicon to TinyURL as well.
November 22nd, 2006 at 1:02 pm
The shortcut/hotkey support in Google Reader makes it even easier to use than a desktop client.
I’m very much a keyboard kinda guy… if there was a desktop client that let me control everything easily from the keyboard, I would probably have been using it.
The other thing about using Google reader is the ability to easily hack/extend it with Greasemonkey. There’s a ton of scripts out there.
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:56 am
I like how Google Reader can seamlessly nest all the things you want to share on the web together. You can put your google shared items to your blog; you can also put your del.icio.us hotlist to your blog; del.icio.us can routinely be updated to include your stumble-upon favorites; you can use google reader to share your del.icio.us profile and your stumbleupon profile, as well as reddit and digg, and CoComment/Haloscan.
Put all this together with how you can share items with google reader, a single feed (shared google reader items) can simultaneously share what you’re into on Del.icio.us, reddit, digg, newsvine, stumbleupon, and even your comment feeds.
that’s hot.
November 23rd, 2006 at 9:06 am
great tips. The gu shortcut is awesome! just one thing you might want to fix, in #5 (tagging) you said to press “gu” to bring up the tags, that should be “gt”.
November 23rd, 2006 at 9:43 am
trevor,
good catch! Typo fixed!
November 23rd, 2006 at 11:34 am
Thank you for the tips! I love Google Reader and did not know about this greasemonkey plugin. Its much appreciated!
November 23rd, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Great Note about greasmonkey
this is really useful
November 23rd, 2006 at 5:23 pm
There’s one problem with the sharing feature. The page created forces a set width for posts, which results in photos being cut in half, example: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/07020086533971149680?c=CJOT1tum4IcCMBs
So I stopped using it and started adding things to del.icio.us instead.
That greasemonkey script looks good though, going to install that when I get home tonight.
November 23rd, 2006 at 8:05 pm
Gareth,
What I like about the sharing feature is the RSS feed that they give you. You could format that feed on your website any way that you want.
They also give you the snippet feature that just puts the headlines on your site.
November 24th, 2006 at 12:14 am
if anyone is looking for a bigger png/ico for Google Reader, I made one the other week :)
November 24th, 2006 at 2:47 am
Just started using Google reader and needed some advice on making the best of it. Specially since I subscribe to too many RSS feeds.
November 24th, 2006 at 4:11 am
is it me, or does google reader just not work in IE7?
and please, spare me the firefox flames.
November 24th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Great tips indeed! I also changed from bloglines to GoogleReader a few weeks ago and I don’t regret a single minute.
November 24th, 2006 at 8:01 am
bb,
What is this IE7 you speak of?
=P
I haven’t tried it in IE.
November 24th, 2006 at 9:07 am
Nice. Thanks. I also found the first tip helpful for several of my other bookmarklets.
November 24th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Will these “tricks” work with IE6 ?
I have been conservative in moving up to IE7.
But then again most Microsoft products after all are Betas.
November 24th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
I still use Bloglines but mainly since Google Reader doesn’t have some of the small features that Bloglines has. For instance, I can tell Bloglines to sort my feeds from latest to earliest, that way I can get the original post first and then an update on it instead of the updated one first. Also, Google Reader, for me, still has some issues like not being able to unsubscribe from certain feeds no matter how many times I tell it to.
I still use Google Reader and it definitely is one of the best feed readers out.
November 24th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
I use the starred and shared as to-do and hot lists, respectively. I star things as I go along; anything I want to get to right away–but later, I move to shared.
And there’s a little trick I noticed one can do with the starred items. If you want to promote something to the top of the starred list, just unstar it and restar it.
November 24th, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Don’t forget the shortcut key “u”, which collapses the subscriptions pane and makes the reading window wider. Priceless for small screens like my 12″ PB and by far the shortcut key I use most often.
November 24th, 2006 at 3:44 pm
Ben,
That’s a great tip… I’ve got a very wide screen, so I haven’t used it, but now that I’ve tried it, I kinda like reading without the folders in the way.
November 24th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
MkaGGL,
That starred items tip is cool… I hadn’t noticed that before.
I just wish Google Reader had a proper search feature. I know there’s a greasemonkey script that lets you do blog searching, but I want to search through the items in my feeds the same way I search in gmail.
November 24th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Not sure what you mean or how to do what you describe in no. 1. Is there another way to describe what needs to be done?
TIA
November 27th, 2006 at 3:39 am
Feeds itself can also be tagged (a bit cumbersome via “Manage subscriptions”) which shows up as a structured view of the feeds in the left column.
November 27th, 2006 at 3:41 am
Stupid smiley replacement … should be \”\).
November 27th, 2006 at 9:47 pm
Cool beans. Thanks for the words.
November 28th, 2006 at 12:14 pm
I didn’t get the “Use the bookmarklet With the Google Reader icon” part. Doesnt’ the Greaemonkey script let you add feeds Greader? Or were you talking about some other bookmarklet?
November 28th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
Mark,
I was talking about the google subscribe bookmarklet. There are times when a feed isn’t auto-detected by the greasemonkey script. Also, some people don’t use greasemonkey and would only use the bookmarklet.
November 29th, 2006 at 7:22 am
WHOA. WTF is Bloglines, Google Reader and GreaseMonkey?
this new technology man is greek. i just use a browser and surf the net.
November 30th, 2006 at 2:17 pm
Awesome! You just made me switch from NetNewsWire to Reader. I originally tried it when it was first released and it was a nightmare. Clearly it’s matured quite a bit. It handled my 300+ subscriptions no problem. I finally organized my feeds so I could be a little more productive. Thanks again for this list.
December 1st, 2006 at 12:43 pm
Any idea how to turn off the sharing of your name with Google Reader?
December 16th, 2006 at 8:50 am
The GreaseMonkey Smart Subscribe script seems to take away the “Feed Settings” drop down button just above the reader portion of Google Reader when on the Google Reader page. Bummer. FF2, WXPSP2
July 28th, 2007 at 3:01 am
these are very good written tips, I use Google reader for a while and I didn’t know most of these tips
thanks
August 6th, 2007 at 10:35 am
Asterbox.com announces the beta release of their Java mobile platform. They have openly declared what many users have felt: surfing the web on a mobile device is a disappointing experience. Their claims that the internet on the phone is dead, but can live on through web services have been embodied in the Asterbox mobile platform. The Java-based platform utilizes web APIs to deliver content and interactivity to end users in a new and innovative way. The software currently provides access to the Google Reader service, but more functionality is in the works.
December 27th, 2007 at 5:59 am
Nice tips - hey if anyone knows how to do this - I love gReader, except for one annoying thing: if an RSS post isn’t formatted in HTML, it gets trimmed to the first I don’t know, 200 characters? Is there anyway to force gReader to output the whole post? I hate having to just click back to the blog on every post - kind of defeats the purpose of an RSS reader, no?