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!

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.

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.

For those not in the know, del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that allows users to collect, categorize, and share links. For example, here’s my bookmark page than can be publicly viewed or subscribed to. With just a few clicks, it’s easy to find pages from users with similar interests.

Like Google Readers Shared Items, these links can be both embedded in a webpage or subscribed to in an RSS reader. I still prefer using FeedBurner to create and manage the embedded links as it offers greater control over content and formatting, but the standard options are nearly as good. 

del.icio.us also has a feature that will post all new links to your blog at the end of each day. Handy for people who are subscribed to your blog via a feed and would otherwise miss the embedded links.

Best of all, installing the del.icio.us toolbar for Firefox or IE makes collecting links a simple two-click process. True, this is one click more than required by Google Reader, but that additional click lets you categorize or comment on the link.

I’ve been using del.icio.us to drive the external links pane on my site for a few weeks now and it beats Google Reader hands-down. I wonder, will people introduced to these concepts by Google Reader eventually switch as they seek more control and features?

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.

Google Reader offers several pre-canned color options for published news items. Amongst these is a ‘none’ option that, I assume, is intended to emit the list of items using only HTML tags. Unfortunately selecting this option has no effect on the JavaScript that’s generated, and attempting to manually tweak the code to use the ‘none’ style results in the list of items failing to display. While it’s possible to modify aspects of the provided styles via CSS and judicious use of the ‘!important’ tag, others style attributes seem impossible to change.

Luckily there’s an easy workaround using FeedBurner and only a little effort. In about 10 minutes you’ll be able to include Google Reader’s Shared Items on your site with any CSS you desire.

1. Add the RSS Feed from your Shared Items to a new or existing FeedBurner account.
2. Within FeedBurner, from the ‘Publicize’ menu select BuzzBoost and choose the display options you desire.
3. Paste the JavaScript from BuzzBoost into your webpage and use the provided guide to customize the appearance. Wrapping the items in a specific div and modifying the header and ul/li tags takes care of most of the work.
4. Should you wish to hide the FeedBurner icon at the bottom of the list, simply add the ‘display:none;’ attribute to the img tag within your Shared Items div.

Voila!