Andrew Grant

This morning, while reading (J,J,J,K-ing) through Google Reader, my girlfriend’s cat (Tigger) decided to walk across my keyboard to get a better look at the buttery muffin next to me.

As he did so, the left-hand menu vanished and the reading pane maximized to fill the remaining space – a layout I wish for everytime I use Reader on the 1024×600 screen of my laptop!

After rechecking the list of shortcuts for Google Reader, some methodical pressing revealed the unlisted key in question – u.

On large screens the difference isn’t as pronounced, but on smaller laptops or tablets, hiding the left-pane increases the reading space anywhere from 25-50%.

Thanks Tigger!

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.

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Yeah I know, I’m late to the del.icio.us party.

When I started using Google Reader I found the ‘Starred’ and ”Shared’ lists a great way to save or republish interesting links. Those starred items soon mount up though, and because there’s no way to categorize them you soon amass a large unsortable and unsearchable collection of links.

The ‘Shared Items’ list is also a great feature. Subscribe to the shared item feeds of a couple of good bloggers, such as Robert Scoble, and and your interesting-items-to-feeds ratio shoots up. Using JavaScript you can even embed your shared item list into your webpage to be shared with visitors.

However, after a while I found an increasing desire to save and share links that I was finding outside of Google Reader, and in some cases to add a line or two of commentary.

Enter del.icio.us.

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(Update: The original bug has now been fixed. I also noticed Johnny K figured out the code required to remove the styling. However, I prefer the output and options offered by FeedBurner so I’m going to stick with my method).

When I started using Google Reader I saw a really nice feature that I was keen to use; Shared Items. For each news item Google Reader provides a “share” button that when clicked adds the item to a public page belonging to the user. For example, here’s mine. Users may create multiple pages for different categories and share their pages with family and friends. They may also incorporate the these items on their own pages by including Google-provided JavaScript.

It was this last feature that I was most interested in. Before now, items in my “Shared News” list have been manually created using mini-blog entries with a special category and some custom code. I thought that by switching to Google Reader’s Shared Items I would save myself a great deal of time – while reading feeds it would only take a single button click to publish items of interest to my shared page. Cool!

However; Although it was easy to use the JavaScript provided by Google Reader to display my shared items, giving them a look and feel consistent with the rest of my main page proved to be virtually impossible.

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I discovered the benefits of using RSS/Atom Feeds over two years ago. Feeds are a method by which users may subscribe to websites and have the latest content delivered to them, without the need to visit the sites in question. If you read a number of websites the main  benefits are two-fold; Not only is content delivered to you as it is created, but you do not waste time visiting sites that have not been updated. Using Feeds I found I was able to read about more topics that interest me in a far shorter time.

After trying various ways of reading feeds I eventually settled on a combination of FeedDemon and NewsGator Online. FeedDemon was fast and efficient, the synchronization via NewsGator Online meant that items read on my home PC were marked as read on my work PC, and vice-versa. I could also use the NewsGator Online website to check feeds from any webbrowser.

Google Reader, a web-based solution, was one of the products I passed over in favor of FeedDemon. When the Google Reader team released a new version at the end of last month I decided to try it out for a few days. Exporting/importing OPML feeds makes it easy to try out different readers without the need to recreate subscriptions.

My ‘few days’ has almost become three weeks, and I find it hard to imagine going back to FeedDemon and NewsGator.

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