Official Google Reader Blog - News, Tips and Tricks from the Reader team

Stay tuned ... it's video in Google Reader

4/28/2006 09:02:00 AM
Posted by Chris Wethrell, Software Engineer

In our never-ending quest to help you waste your day in better and richer ways, we've added support for video feeds that have Flash players. Mainly, this means you can watch videos from Google Video or YouTube directly in Reader. Here's a few feeds that work well:

Oh, the hours you can waste!

Fun for publishers: If you have a site that publishes videos as Flash files, then you can add support for your site in Google Reader by adding an enclosure to each appropriate item in either your RSS or Atom feed like the following:

<enclosure url="http://example/example-flash-video-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/> (for RSS feeds)
or
<link rel="enclosure" href="http://example/example-flash-video-player.swf" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"/> (for Atom feeds)

As we've mentioned before our plan is to add support for the Media RSS extension as well, but we had the enclosure support ready today and wanted to let interested publishers play around with it.

Happy watching!

Labels: Better, stronger, faster

4/07/2006 12:52:00 PM
Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Between the label selector and ability to share, labels are getting more and more useful in Reader. Today we're happy to release additional enhancements that make labels even more useful:

  • Deletion: You can now delete labels you don't need or use anymore.
  • Auto-completion: So that you don't have to remember if it's "friends" or "myfriends", we now provide an auto-complete drop down menu that shows you labels that match what you've typed in so far. You can use the arrows and enter key to pick from the choices.
  • Easier application: To begin labeling an individual item, just hit the L key on your keyboard.

We've also made it easier to unsubscribe from feeds (each one has an "unsubscribe" link next to it in the list). Finally, we've fixed a few bugs, especially with the sharing section and clips.