Google Reader
Google Reader was announced today.
It’s rather cool. There’s a preview feature, which I’ve found missing in other feed readers I’ve tried. Here’s a preview of my feed (must be signed into your Google account for it to work). You can see all my latest entries, and there’s a big, fat Subscribe button at the top. You will notice, if you’re paying attention, that it supports Atom 1.0.
I’m happy with the lack of technical terms, and the way the subscription is handled. You’re not expected to find a feed URI and put it in manually. All you do is search and subscribe.
How do you subscribe to a feed when you’re already at a website and you can’t be bothered to go to Reader and search for the feed? Get a bookmarklet to do it: → Reader (Yay! My first bookmarklet!). It finds the author’s preferred feed and takes you to the preview page where you can subscribe. It only has one real bug; it takes you to a blank page with a cryptic message if there are no feeds listed on a Web page.
Update: I’ve found several other bookmarklets since I first posted this:
October 9th, 2005 at 08:44 EDT
Thanks for the bookmarklet, I’ll have to take a look.
I did up some badges/chicklet buttons if you’re interested - http://chrisnolan.ca/archive/ID/658
October 9th, 2005 at 20:04 EDT
Great idea Holizz. Thanks for the bookmarklet!
- Jason from the Reader Team
October 10th, 2005 at 04:09 EDT
Thanks for bookmarklet!
October 12th, 2005 at 01:21 EDT
Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad somebody found it useful.
October 12th, 2005 at 08:41 EDT
Thanks for the bookmarket. This will come in handy.
October 14th, 2005 at 21:05 EDT
Your bookmarklet is a good start, I’m working going on a more robust version right now. It will fix your small bug, support relative addresses, and Xanga (even though Google Reader doesn’t yet support the xanga community, so that part of the bookmarklet won’t be of any use untill the GR starts supporting them.) And I’m going to try and get if to work if you are view an RSS/ATOM feed, but I’m not sure how to do that just yet.
Thanks for the great start,
GodsMoon
October 14th, 2005 at 23:55 EDT
Gasp! Relative URIs! How could I forget that? I’m a bad person.
I actually wrote some other JavaScript related to Reader while I was writing that bookmarklet, but I didn’t post it. I guess I didn’t think it was much more useful than the bookmarklet; it was also much, much longer. Not really bookmarklet material. Google Reader JavaScripting. It grabs all the links with feed MIME types and constructs some HTML with links to Previews of all the feeds and then sticks that in a data: URI. It could be a better base than the original bookmarklet.
I’m glad you thought my bookmarklet was worth improving. Keep me posted if you release anything. Thank you.
October 16th, 2005 at 18:20 EDT
that’s brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
October 17th, 2005 at 17:33 EDT
I’ve published my improved bookmarklet onmy website. Tell me what you think. If you like it, a link to it would be appreciated. Thanks for the great start.
October 24th, 2005 at 10:03 EDT
Google Reader cooking in the labs
Google Reader is Google’s foray into the heavy weight RSS reader market.
Looks great, has some good functionality, but not good enough for my liking, although if it changed 3 or 4 features it would be a good competitor in the advanced RSS reader…
October 27th, 2005 at 21:11 EDT
thanks for the bookmarklet. handy!
November 9th, 2005 at 13:13 EST
I made a greasemonkey / user script that automatically pops up a “subscribe in google reader” panel to pages you visit that list one or more feeds yesterday. It’s available (together with similar scripts for a few other readers too) at http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2005/11/subscribe-to-feed-user-scripts.html