I use Google Reader every day. There are only a handful of sites I visit besides it, now that almost everything has an RSS or Atom feed I can get the content delivered straight to Reader and have it all in one place waiting for me. I also have a tendency to keep track of a lot of things going on on the internet, if you hadn’t noticed from my posts here on this blog. Google Reader has helped me streamline that process and I definitely oversubscribe to more content than I will actually read. I subscribe to a blog on a whim; I occasionally go through and clean out old subscriptions to things that I haven’t read at all recently but if I think there’s any chance that I’ll be interested in something a website has to say then I’ll add a subscription to it just to start. These days I hover around 200-250 subscriptions (but keep in mind that many of these websites no longer update regularly or only update once every couple of weeks). Google said I’ve read 8664 items over the past 30 days, which sounds about right. But keep in mind I’m not really reading those 290 posts a day. I’m skimming, picking out those posts that actually look interesting to me, and often skipping them almost immediately when I’ve decided they don’t contain any value to me.
One thing that I feel I should mention is important when you’re handling this many items is that List View becomes essential. I also live and die by “Sort by oldest”– I actually refused to use Google Reader back when they didn’t have this. I need to be able to start at the oldest post for a given subset of feeds and read them in chronological order from top to bottom. I’m just picky like that.
Anyway! I do actually have three secrets that I’ve decided to write about here. The first two are probably too simple for the real nerds and too complicated for the cool kids, but who knows? Maybe you’ll like them and use them too.
Mark Until Current As Read
This is a Greasemonkey script (if you don’t have Greasemonkey, you can install it for Firefox here) that lets you select a single post in Google Reader and then press a key combination to make it go back through every post above it and mark those posts as read. This is a great thing if you are looking at a huge list of articles and don’t finish before you need to step away. If you’ve been skimming, maybe you’ve only marked a few as read because you’re in list view and you didn’t bother expanding articles for headlines that didn’t sound interesting to you. Now you can clear out all of those by just installing this script and putting it to work.
Instapaper Integration
Instapaper is a service that lets you store links for future reading. It’s extremely lightweight and works in any browser via its javascript bookmarks, so it’s really easy to set it up on any computer/browser you use regularly. When you go back to the Instapaper site, you get a quick and easy list of all the stuff you’ve bookmarked and you can review the stuff, delete it, or get text-only views of some of it. It also has an iPhone app (both a free and a paid version; I use the free one) that will download the article for you so you can read the text of the pages when you don’t have cellular or wifi reception. This is pretty handy in and of itself, but if you want to use it with Google Reader you have to open the page first, then add it to Instapaper, then go back to Google Reader. For a while I was doing this in batches by starring the item first and then going through and adding all of my starred items to Instapaper when I was at home, but then a userscript got written to integrate Instapaper functionality straight into Reader. If you install it from this site (note that there are some instructions you have to follow to put your user id into the script), you can just press ‘b’ while looking at an article and Instapaper will add it to your reading list for later without even opening the page. This saves me a LOT of time and I frequently do a first pass of my Google Reader items, bookmarking things I want to come back to later because they’re long or they have a video in them or whatever and only reading the short items– then I go back to Instapaper later when I have a chance to catch up and clean out that list too.
Have Cool Friends
This one is the most important of all, in my opinion, to making Google Reader really amazing and awesome. I have gathered up a great assortment of friends who use Google Reader, from people I met in college or at work to people I only know from the internet. Their tastes and what they find interesting are wide-ranging and the stuff that comes through to me via their shared items is a great way for me to find the absolute best posts on blogs that I find to be too low when it comes to signal-to-noise or on topics that I just don’t know anything about! I get great stuff about economics, fashion, pop culture, computer science, food, and more on a daily basis. Thanks, friends!
