I’ve noticed that regardless of how the subscription occurred, Google Reader now allows you to assign your new feed to a folder. When this feature was first added it worked only for for feeds added within Reader, a method I found I barely used. I’m sure most people subscribe to feeds they stumble upon in their browser so this change is very welcome.

It’s great that the team keep adding these little fixes and enhancements, but I do wish there was an official change-log somewhere In past updates there have been some nice little things tweaked that I’ve completely missed until finding them while changing another setting!

Over the Thanksgiving break I spent some time trying out the mobile version of Google Reader on my T-Mobile MDA, via both Wi-Fi and GPRS. It’s an impressive and clean frontend, but unfortunately there are a few minor design flaws that can make the experience a little cumbersome.

Firstly, although you can view a paginated list of items there is no way to mark this visible list as read. Items are only marked as read once individually viewed. While this is fine for certain feeds, in most cases I want to be able to skim through these pages, stopping only to view posts with subjects that catch my eye.

On a similar theme; In the single-item view the links that take you to the next unread item are unfortunately placed at the bottom of the page. This means you may have to skip through several pages before you can use these links. On devices that use the jog button to both scroll and highlight links, that can be a heck of a lot of clicks for a good sized post.

There are a few other minor quirks, but these are the two that really slowed me down. Still, as an early effort it’s not bad at all. I believe there are some mobile feed readers out there that are probably better, but I doubt their non-mobile versions would be enough to tempt me from Google Reader.