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How to Get Most From Google Reader

Posted by sudhirmangla December 14, 2008

Google has taken the task of RSS feeds and made it easy. Google Reader is a tool that allows you to keep up with your favorite blogs and news. Google Reader is easy to hack because it’s web-based — users have created everything from Greasemonkey scripts to entire themes. With a few scripts and some ingenious tips you’ll soon be a Google Reader power user in no time. So roll up your sleeves and get ready to dive in.

How to User Google Reader

  1. You must have a Google account to use this program. Go to the Google Reader web site and if you don’t have an account, you will be asked to create one. It is free and very simple to create.
  2. Once you have an account and you log in, click on "Your Subscriptions"
  3. Click "Add a Feed" to add a feed you already know.

Tips and Tricks for Google Reader

Organization tips for Google Reader

Once you start adding RSS feeds, it becomes a river of information. In fact, without organization, you might drown in a sea of headlines. Reader makes it relatively easy to organize feeds by creating tags which show up in the left-hand column, similar to folders.

For example, you might create a "tips" tag and use it to hold all the various subscriptions from tips.developersvoice.com and related sites. You can tag the same feed "tech" so you can gather all your technology related feeds together in another "folder." If you read an item tagged in one folder, it will be marked read in all others as well.

If you are able to manage the tags feature in Google Reader, it can serve as a huge information resource. You just have to make sure that you separate the tags and folders, because for Google Reader both are same.

For example, lets say I subscribe to 3 productivity related blogs. I’d tag them as ‘Productivity’ and automatically a folder gets created with that name which will include those 3 blogs. However, if I come across a good post in one of those blogs which I want to save for future reference, I’d assign a separate tag to that post which is different from the names of any folders I’ve created. This way I can easily access that specific post later using the corresponding tag.

Google Reader Shortcuts

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:

  1. ga – Go to all items view.
  2. gs – Go to Starred Items.
  3. gu – Open up Ajax’y dialog to quickly select a particular feed.
  4. gt – Open up Ajax’y dialog to quickly select a tag
  5. s – Star an item
  6. n – Navigate to next item without opening it
  7. p – Navigate to previous item without opening it
  8. j – Open next item
  9. k – Open previous item
  10. o – Open / Close item
  11. r – Refresh. (I think I’ve worn out this key)
  12. t – Pop up dialog box letting you assign a tag to an item. Very cool.
  13. Shift+A – Mark all as read.

The two you’ll find most useful are J and K for quickly skimming through feeds, S for marking important items for reading later. Gmail fans will notice the shortcut keys are loosely similar. The shortcuts can be traced back to command-line text editors Vi or Vim originally found on Unix-based operating systems.

Another trick: if you’ve reached the end of your unread items in one folder and want to jump to the next folder without resorting to mouse, just hit Shift-N to select the next folder and then Shift-O to load its contents. If keyboard shortcuts aren’t your bag, check out Read by Mouse, a Greasemonkey script which when toggled gives you some additional mouse based options. When you activate it, the script will make left clicks go to the next item, right clicks go to the previous item. Middle clicks perform whatever action you select from a drop-down list: open original URL in tab, share the item, star the item, or add a specified tag to the item. The script works wherever Greasemonkey does.

Google Reader Browser-based tricks

Perhaps the best browser-based tip is to install Gears, which will enable you to take Google Reader offline. Using Reader offline means you can read your feeds wherever you like — no internet connection needed. Gears is available for nearly all platforms, on Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers.

Once you have offline capabilities set up, it’s time to explore some third-party scripts and hacks.

There are literally hundreds of Greasemonkey scripts to customize and enhance Google Reader, but our favorite way to get the cream of the crop is using Lifehacker Gina Tripani’s Better Google Reader, a Firefox extension which takes many of the most useful Greasemonkey scripts and wraps them up in a neat package.

Here’s a few of our favorites Greasemonkey scripts:

  1. Custom Search – adds a custom Google-powered search box to Google Reader.
  2. Google Reader + Del.icio.us – bookmark items to Del.icio.us without leaving your Reader page.
  3. Original Item Preview – very cool script that replaces Google’s item summary with the actual blog item. For instance, you’ll be able to Digg and to comment on Digg articles directly from your Reader account.
  4. Auto Add – lets you bypass the page that asks you whether you want to add the feed to ‘Personalized Homepage’ (iGoogle) or Google Reader when you click on a feed. Directly takes you to Google Reader, so that you can subscribe.
  5. Smart Subscribe – shows if the webpage you are on has already been listed among your subscriptions.
  6. Google Reader Folders on Gmail – adds a little box to your Gmail page that lists GReader folders along with the number of unread items in each.
  7. Optimized – removes rarely used items to maximize the reading area. On occasions when you need to go through hundreds of items at once, this stripped-down interface may be preferable.
  8. Mac OS X Theme – basically this script makes GReader look like any other Mac-style app. If interested, here is a good guide how to implement this on other browsers (Camino, Omniweb, Opera).

Misc Tips and Tricks for Google Reader

Using the Sharing features —
Google reader lets you mark items to share. You get your own URL and your own RSS feed of shared items, so why not use them? To start sharing items, just click the "Share" link at the bottom of the item, or hit Shift-S. There’s also a WordPress plugin to display your shared items on your blog. You can even pass your shared items directly on to Twitter.

Use Better Google Reader :
Better GReader is a Firefox extension created by Lifehacker’s editor Gina Trapani. It adds many features to Google Reader but if you were to ask how it makes you productive, I’d tell you about the preview item feature. This feature lets you view a blog post in its original form within Google Reader and you can add a comment to that post without leaving Google Reader’s interface.

Get a Desktop Notifier — Don’t have your browser open all the time? No problem, just install a notifier and you can see when news arrives. There are versions for Mac, Windows, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Go Mobile — Google Reader offers a mobile optimized version for reading news on the go. Just point your mobile browser to http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/. If you’re on an iPhone you can get your own iPhone-specific version at http://www.google.com/reader/i/

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