3monkeys

Previously in this series, Google Reader: Getting Setup.

I have been using Google Reader for a little over a week now. It has been generally a pleasant experience. However, there have been some areas where I feel there could be some improvements. In this article I will discuss my experiences with the the various Google Reader settings. This is meant to be a reference for new users and a preview for potential new users. I normally begin using a new application by reviewing all of its settings. Google Reader has five settings tabs; Subscriptions, Tags, Goodies, Import/Export and Preferences, these settings will be discussed below.

Subscriptions

While we took a brief look at the Subscriptions tab in the last article, we will cover it in more detail now. In Subscriptions you can either perform actions on individual feeds, or on a group of selected feeds. For individual feeds, you can rename the feed, unsubscribe to the feed or assign the feed to folders. I’ve used the Rename feed quite often. I’ve found when subscribing to feeds that frequently the feed title has additional text that I do not need; in particular “powered by FeedBurner” is particularly common.

I use the Change folders option much more frequently. Selecting a folder from the drop down will either, add it to, or remove it from, the related folder. You may also add a new folder from the drop down, but as stated in the previous article, this does not populate the remaining select box controls which is quite frustrating. A feed can be assigned to multiple folders. This is useful if a feed clearly fits into more than one category.

The unsubscribe to feed option operates as expected, even prompting you in the event you miss clicked. This option is represented as a trashcan icon to the right of the feed name.

Using bulk feed options, you can either add or remove folders or unsubscribe multiple feeds. The unsubscribe feed option operates in the same way as the single feed operation, however, the Add/Remove tag option operates slightly different. Tags that are not associated with any of the selected feeds are listed under Add tag, while tags associated with any of the selected feeds are listed under Remove tags.

You can quickly select all feeds, no feeds, or unassigned feeds. This can be further refined by using the filter located in the right-hand side of the header. The filter works for both tags and urls. One complaint is that it filters on both tags and urls at the same time, this does not allow for multiple tag filtering such as “web, Internet, www”. This type of feature would allow the user to quickly reorganize his tags.

Tags

The Tags tab is very similar to the Subscription tag. It allows you to delete or change a tag’s public/private status, however, it does allow tag renaming. As far as quick selection of tags go, any of All, None, Public or Private can be selected. By default all tags are flagged as private other than the global shared items. When a tag is shared, items filed under that tag are shared publicly. The tag’s items can then be viewed via a public Google page, through an RSS feed or through a clip on your web site. An example of the clip method can be found in the sidebar under the heading Interesting Articles. You can also see these items through the public Google Reader page, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

One annoyance is empty tags can not be created in this tab. Tags can only be created by one of two methods.

• Creating a folder, folders assume a tag name of the folder itself
• Choosing Edit tags on an individual story

Goodies

The Goodies tab provides four tools for you to use with Google Reader

• Add Reader to your Google Personalized Homepage
• Put Reader in a bookmark
• Use Reader on your phone
• Subscribe as you surf

The Personalized Homepage gadget provides a quick view of your reader items. If you use the Personalized Homepage frequently you will likely find this widget useful. You can choose to display from 1 to 10 items from your reader sorted either by date or automatically. You may also view all items or only unread items. The widget also allows you to open items in a new window, the same window, or the coolest of them all in a bubble.

For heavy reading, I still prefer the full interface, but the updates on the Google Homepage help find those articles when I’m not actively reading. The only annoyance is that I can not select several tags to view at one time.

There are two bookmarklet Goodies. The first is the Next bookmarklet which, which when added to your browsers bookmark bar allows you to browse to the next item in your reader list. You can also choose to configure the bookmarklet, to operate on any given tag. One thing I found annoying is that if you click on next while viewing a site that is not in your subscription list, Google reader takes you to the next feed and not the next item. I personally have chosen not to use this method , due to my reading habits, but you may find it of value.

The second bookmarklet is Subscribe. I find this one very useful, but the necessity to click and subscribe again on the feed preview page seems redundant. You are able to file the feed under folders, as well, during this process. There are other process for adding subscriptions to Google Reader, such as the default Firefox 2.0 subscribe method and Google Toolbar’s Subcribe tool among others. These are outside of the scope of this article and will be discussed in a future article.

The final Goody is phone access to Google. Simply direct your phones web browser to www.google.com/reader/m. If you add the Reader gadget to your personalized homepage, Reader will show up on your phones Google Homepge automatically.

Import/Export

The Import/Export tab was discussed in Google Reader: Getting Setup. please refer to that article for discussion on the tab.

Preferences

The Preferences tab is really not all that interesting. There are only two options of consequence, Start page and Scroll tracking. Start page allows you to switch which page is initially display when you visit Google Reader. By default it is Home, this is the page I use through the All items page, which may be useful for a lot of users. You can also set the start page to any of your tags. Scroll tracking is a useful option. When activated, this option automatically marks items as read when you scroll past them in the expanded view. I find this very helpful when reading tags with many items. If an item belongs to more than one tag, it is marked as read in all tags.

There it is, a comprehensive review of the Google Reader settings. In my next article, I will explore some creative uses of tags, shared feeds and subscription methods.

Until next time-

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 17% [?]

After sometime of exclusively using RSS Ticker and Live Bookmarks in Firefox, I decided to try another aggregator. After soliciting suggestions from colleagues, I decided to give Google Reader a test drive. I thought my experiences might be of use to others so I am chronicling them here. I this article I will walk through the various steps I used in setting up Google Reader for basic feed reading. In later articles I will explore Google Reader features and how to use it more effectively.

The first thing I was exposed to was this video. Maybe Chris is a little too happy about Google Reader, we will see. So, on to the real work. Google Reader presents the user with three initial ways of subscribing to feeds; feed bundles, user feeds from a variety of social sites such as Blogger or Flickr, and search and browse.

Click to enlarge

The first feed I wanted to add was 3Monkeys, so I chose the search feature. I was a little surprised by the results. There were 20 feeds in the results and the 3Monkey feed was included along with feeds to some of my social networking sites and several blogs that had written stories about me. What was a little disturbing is that some feeds where listed multiple times, in particular digg was listed 5 times, 3Monkeys 4 times, and del.icio.us and Netscape twice each. I would think that Google would have done a better job at identifying and limiting duplicate entries. I happened to notice a few other areas where Google could improve:

• The search did not indicate how many matches occurred, I actually had to count the results. While this is of little concern for such a small number of results as 3Monkeys, other searches may provide thousands of results. It would be nice to see the number of matches in order to know when you should refine your search terms.
• The individual results have very little preview content and are not click-able. I think previewing the feed to be certain it is the one you want is an essential feature Google should add.
• Since the search for 3Monkeys did span more than one page, when I had navigated to the second page and wanted to return to the first page I clicked the “Back” button in my browser. That was a mistake. Google reader makes heavy use of AJAX and this action caused me to return to the site I had previously been viewing.

Once I added 3Monkeys, I noticed that Google Reader updated each of the listed results for 3Monkeys as being subscribed. A slight improvement, but I would rather have duplicates eliminated.

Next, I wanted to explore the bundles. Google Reader provides three bundle categories in the main browse page, News, Sports and Fun, with a link to an additional 12 categories. While an interesting concept, I found that the overall makeup of the bundles was some what lacking. In most bundles there were feeds I was interested in, however there were just as many or more that I was not. It would be more effective for the new user to have a choice of individual feeds separated by topic rather than these prepackaged bundles. Google does provide this type of functionality in some sense by supplying a few topic searches at the bottom of the page: All, News, Fun & Games, Finance, Sports, Lifestyle, Technology

The social network feeds method of subscribing to feeds was of no help to me. Currently only seven sites are supported: Blogger, del.icio.us, Flickr, LiveJournal, MySpace, Windows Live Spaces and Xanga. If you have friends on any of these sites this may be of interest to you.

What I was interested in was importing my Live Bookmark feeds from Firefox. Separated from the other feed population methods is an Import your subscriptions link. This link takes you to a setting screen where you may import an OPML list of feeds. Since Firefox does not naively support OPML export of Live Bookmarks, the first order of business was to download and install the OPML Support plugin. The plugin installs fine and is easy enough to use. Below are two screen shots of the process used to export my Live Bookmarks as an OPML file.

The File -> Export -> OPML Option is added by the OPML Support plugin

Change “What do you want to export?” to Livemarks

The resulting OPML file was then successfully uploaded in the Import/Export Settings screen in Google Reader. If you are switching from another reader and have many existing feeds, I strongly suggest using this feature.

Next, I set out to organize my feeds into topic folders. This was one of the reasons I had decided to try a new reader in the first place. After the import Google Reader redirected my to the Settings -> Subscription page.

Click to enlarge

This allowed me to quickly move feeds into appropriate folders, rename feeds more descriptively and remove feeds that I no longer read. One issue I found while organizing my feeds, was that when I added a new folder, while that folder name would be displayed for the feed, it did not appear in the drop-downs for other feeds. Since, many of my feeds were being moved to common folders, this was a little annoying. I worked around this by navigating back to the main Google Reader page, and then back to the Settings page. This would refresh the drop-down content. Another annoyance was the inability to preview the feeds while sorting them in to folders.

So there you have it, the steps needed to setup a Google Reader account and start receiving feeds. Next time we will look at ways to effectively use Google Reader.

Until next time-

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 14% [?]

Adobe announced the release of Adobe Flash Player 9 today. While I’ve been using the beta version since it was released, I am glad to see an official release. This reconfirms my view that Adobe is interested in providing cross platform solutions.

Adobe Systems Incorporated today announced the availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems. Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers can create, test and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex® 2 Software Developers Kit (SDK), Adobe Flash Player 9 and the free Flex Data Services 2 Express.

The player can be downloaded here as either a .tar.gz or .rpm. Now, if we can get Photoshop ported to Linux.

Until next time-

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 6% [?]