Bug swatting

10/27/2006 11:44:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Being an engineer isn't always about working on fun new features -- sometimes there are bugs that need to be fixed before anything else can happen. This is especially important in an application like Reader; if you use something every day, even small bugs can start to get very annoying. Here's what's been keeping the team busy this past week:

• The shared items clip that you can embed on your site will not interfere with other JavaScript that may be running (sorry about that, Stephanie).
• A confirmation message is now shown when coming in from the "Add to Google" page (this includes the feed subscribe functionality built into Firefox 2).
• Searching for feeds using keywords now works in Opera.
• The scrolling position is now always reset when moving between feeds or folders (meaning items won't inadvertently be marked as read if you're using scroll tracking in expanded view).
• The "none" color scheme for publisher clips now works (no more creative workarounds required).
• The email that we supply for sending shared tags to friends now contains the right link.
• Using the "next" bookmarklet correctly marks all items as read when displaying an entire blog. (We had been overly aggressive here, and marking items as read into the future as well!)
• Items from different feeds or folders are no longer mixed together when clicking between them quickly.
• Keyboard shortcuts in Internet Explorer should continue to work after using "gt" or "gu" (the tag and subscription selectors).

We also snuck in a small feature with this release: when you subscribe to a feed, you'll get an "Add to a folder..." drop-down. This way, you can move that feed to a folder right there and then, without having to go to the settings screen.

We made it (a little bit) better

10/09/2006 12:30:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

It's been a very exciting week since we did our big Reader update. It's good to see that people have been liking our work. At the same time, we know there's still lots to do, which is why we've been busy fixing bugs and tweaking things in response to user feedback. Today we did a small release, a .0.1 of sorts. Here are some of the things that changed:

Pick your start page: You can now select which page you'd like to see when you first log in to Reader ("Home", "All items", or any folder or tag). Simply go to settings and on the Preferences tab pick which one you'd like to see.

Hiding the left side: If you'd like to get the list of subscriptions on the left out of the way so you can focus on what you're reading, you can just hit the u key (press it again to go back to the regular view).

Refreshing: We've added a small "Refresh" link at the bottom of the list of subscriptions, so you can easily refresh them to see if there are new items. Better yet, they will automatically refresh every few minutes, so you shouldn't even have to click the link. When an unread count has changed, it will flash yellow for a split-second to help you find it. This yellow fade made our Web 2.0 meter that we have in our office move up a tick.

Space is smart again: The space key now intelligently goes from item to item and from page to page (for longer items), just like it used to in the old interface.

In addition to all this, we've also fixed a few bugs. Your feedback in the discussion group has been very helpful in helping us prioritize, so please keep posting there (even if we don't reply to every single message, we are reading all of your comments).

Something looks... different.

9/28/2006 04:20:00 PM

Posted by Ben Darnell, Software Engineer As of today, Google Reader has a new look — and even more important, a lot of new features that we think you'll like. We've listened to your feedback, done usability research, and examined all the ways that people consume content on the web, from feed readers to email clients. With a clean interface and some JavaScript wizardry, we think we've built an application that accommodates a wide range of reading styles while being fun and easy to use.

So what's new? First, we've added some things you've been asking for, such as unread counts and "mark all as read." Folder-based navigation makes it easier to organize your subscriptions, and the new expanded view lets you quickly scan over several items at once. And we've made sharing much easier - with a single click of the "shared" icon, you can publish an interesting item on your public sharing page for your friends to see. So give the new Reader a try. We hope you like it!

And what about the old interface? Well, things might look different, but we made sure the new interface enabled the reading style of current Reader users. For example, clicking "All items" and choosing "List view" should make the experience feel quite familiar. But since it's possible that we've overlooked your favorite feature from version 1, you still have the option (in "Settings") to switch back to the old interface for the time being. If you do, please let us know why so we can improve the new version to better suit your needs.

One last thing: Chris made a video for the launch. We think it's fun:

Namespaced Extensions in Feeds

8/03/2006 07:38:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Feeds can be used for more than just text; they can embed pictures, podcasts and video. There are even more esoteric bits of data that can be attached to feeds, like the geographic location that a post is about, the number of comments it has received and that (legal) license its contents are available under. To make all of this information easily parseable by computers, it is usually available as additional items and attributes in XML namespaces. For example, the Media RSS namespace is used to add more information about videos and pictures, like dimensions, duration and a thumbnail.

This usually isn't of direct interest to end users, it's just matter of which namespaced extensions a feed reader supports, and the more the merrier. However, since there are quite a few ones out there, developers must make trade-offs and decisions. One easy way to prioritize extension support is to see which ones are used more often.

I wrote a small MapReduce program to go over our BigTable and get the top 50 namespaces based on the number of feeds that use them. This means that we only looked at feeds that have at least one subscriber, i.e. the "feeds that matter." Note that the default namespaces for syndication feed formats (e.g. http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom for Atom 1.0) are excluded, since I was interested only in extensions to the elements that are already expected to be in a feed.

We thought this information might be of interest to others, the way our analysis of XML errors and web authoring statistics have been. If I have missed anything, or if you have any feedback, a message in our discussion group or a link to this blog post is the best way to reach us.

% of Feeds	Namespace	URI
29.36%	Dublin Core	http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/
15.71%	XHTML	http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml
11.92%	Blogger Atom API Extensions	http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#
11.88%	Blogger Draft Extension	http://purl.org/atom-blog/ns#
11.16%	RSS 1.0 Content Module	http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/
8.39%	Well-Formed Web Comment API	http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/
5.35%	RSS 1.0 Administrative Module	http://webns.net/mvcb/
3.85%	FeedBurner Extensions	http://rssnamespace.org/feedburner/ext/1.0
3.74%	MSN Spaces	http://schemas.microsoft.com/msn/spaces/2005/rss
3.66%	Slash	http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/
3.59%	RSS 1.0 Syndication Module	http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/
2.50%	iTunes	http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd
2.49%	LiveJournal RSS Module 1.0	http://www.livejournal.org/rss/lj/1.0/
2.33%	Dublin Core Terms	http://purl.org/dc/terms/
2.27%	Microsoft Simple List Extensions	http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005
2.00%	Yahoo Media RSS	http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/
1.24%	RSS 1.0 Taxonomy Module	http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/taxonomy/
1.06%	TrackBack Module for RSS 1.0/2.0	http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/
1.04%	creativeCommons RSS Module	http://backend.userland.com/creativeCommonsRssModule
0.92%	OpenSearch	http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.1/
0.68%	Basic Geo (WGS84 lat/long) Vocabulary	http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#
0.54%	Atom Threading	http://purl.org/syndication/thread/1.0
0.42%	Creative Commons (RDF)	http://web.resource.org/cc/
0.39%	Technorati API	http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml
0.36%	Google Calendar	http://schemas.google.com/gCal/2005
0.31%	Google GData	http://schemas.google.com/g/2005
0.28%	Feed History	http://purl.org/syndication/history/1.0
0.28%	eBay	urn:ebay:apis:eBLBaseComponents
0.27%	Pheed	http://www.pheed.com/pheed/
0.23%	RSS 1.0 Annotation Module	http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/annotation/
0.21%	PRISM	http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/1.2/basic/
0.18%	Bulkfeeds	http://bulkfeeds.net/xmlns#
0.16%	Atom Indexing	urn:atom-extension:indexing
0.15%	AOL Journals	http://journals.aol.com/_atom/aj#
0.14%	Jive Forums	http://www.jivesoftware.com/xmlns/jiveforums/rss
0.13%	Yahoo! Weather	http://xml.weather.yahoo.com/ns/rss/1.0
0.11%	RSSWriter Manifest	http://usefulinc.com/rss/manifest/
0.11%	FOAF Vocabulary	http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
0.10%	Feedster	http://feedster.com/feedstersearch/ext/1.0
0.10%	Google Picasa Web	http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/picasaweb/
0.09%	RSS 1.0 Link Module	http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/link/
0.09%	Buzznet	http://www.buzznet.com/1.0/
0.09%	Digg	http://digg.com/docs/diggrss/
0.09%	PubSub	http://pubsub.com/xmlns
0.09%	Snaplog PhotoBlog RSS extension	http://snaplog.com/backend/PhotoBlog.html
0.08%	XSL	http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform
0.07%	Hatena XML Namespace	http://www.hatena.ne.jp/info/xmlns#
0.07%	iTunes Music Store	http://phobos.apple.com/rss/1.0/modules/itms/
0.07%	Furl	http://www.furl.net/resources/furlRSS.jsp#
0.06%	Google Base	http://base.google.com/cns/1.0
0.06%	Web Wiz Forums	http://syndication.webwizguide.info/rss_namespace/

Your wish is our command

7/19/2006 12:21:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Here's some recent changes we've made to Reader that we thought you'd like to know about:

Reading list ordering defaults: Your reading list can be sorted in different ways (by date or "automatically", which shows you more relevant items first). Additionally, it can have read items hidden or always visible. Until this week, the default combination was to sort automatically and show read items. Unfortunately, this meant that new items did not necessarily end up at the top, which was confusing to some users. We've therefore changed the defaults to sort by date and hide read items. If you prefer a different combination, these settings can be controlled by the links at the bottom of your reading list (pictured on the right).

Related subscriptions menu: When we made the recent improvements to reading by subscription or label, we neglected one use case, which was to see a list of subscriptions that have a particular label. Based on feedback from our users, we've added a new menu, "Related subscriptions," that shows up when selecting a label or a subscription that has labels.

Starring in the mobile interface: Our mobile interface is handy for when you're on the go, but occasionally you can come across an item that you would like to re-read when you're back at your computer. Until now, the mobile interface provided no way to flag an item so you could find it later. Now all items that you read have a "Add star" link at the bottom of the page, so you can easily add it to your starred items.

Bugfixes: As usual, with each release we try to polish Reader by fixing bugs here and there. Some recent ones that we've squashed include: better Safari support on the settings page and when marking items as read, better support for non-audio enclosures and better support for relative URLs in entries.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback and bug reports. The best way to make yourself heard is to post in our discussion group.

Careful where you step! We're moving the furniture in Google Reader.

6/27/2006 09:03:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

We just made some improvements to managing your stuff in Google Reader to better enable doing lots of things at once. If Reader were a house, I guess we just knocked down a wall -- so you can finally get to the bathroom from the bedroom. (And we added a new patio while we were at it.)

A new settings page

There's now a link in the top right that says "Settings". Clicking on that link opens up a new screen that lists all of your subscriptions and labels, and allows you to make edits to more than one item at a time. We've also added a bunch of new filtering and selection controls. And there's a new feature as well: you can rename any of your subscriptions.

Menus

We've replaced the drawer on the front page with menus for subscriptions and labels. They're faster to load, especially if you have a lot of subscriptions. What's best, the menus allow you to select things without having to shove most of the application out of view.

You are probably already thinking of a number of cool things these changes could allow. You can probably imagine being able to sort subscriptions, or see what things have new stuff in them. Yep. We can too, and we'll be working on that stuff actively.

With a little help from our users

6/07/2006 07:23:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

The Reader team is pretty small and while the list of things we'd like to do is a mile long, there are only so many hours in a day. It's always very satisfying to see that we have users passionate enough to step in and do some of the things that we always thought would be nice to have. Here's some recent examples of this:

Jason Toal has put together an excellent screencast that covers nearly all of the features that Google Reader has to offer. If you know someone who is new to the application, point them to it and they will quickly get up to speed. Even if you are a seasoned user yourself, you may be interested in the more advanced features that are covered, such as sharing.

Speaking of our sharing feature, people have figured out very seamless ways of integrating clips into their sites.

Eli Dourado has written GROSX, a notifier for Mac OS X that tells you when you have new items to read in your Reader account. In addition to a menu bar icon, GROSX also integrates with Growl, allowing you to get notifications of new items with cool translucent overlays. GROSX also lets you monitor a specific label so that, if you have 390 subscriptions like me, you can monitor only the really important things.

You can now use Google Reader from your phone.

5/18/2006 05:45:00 PM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

Google Reader can now be placed in your pocket, your handbag, your backpack, or thrown from person to person in a game of "keep away". We've just released a mobile-friendly interface for Google Reader.

If you use the Google Personalized Homepage and have installed our Reader Homepage Module, it'll automatically show up on your mobile homepage. Simply go to google.com on your mobile phone's browser and click the link to "Personalized Home".

It's great for browsing your reading list during meetings (not that the Reader team is doing this) or while waiting in line to renew your car registration.

Good times. I'd like to note that the San Francisco DMV is much faster than it used to be, I waited only 15 minutes last month.

There's some Reader in my Homepage!

5/04/2006 09:55:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage have always been kindred spirits, seeing as both deal with feeds (and the teams sit 10 feet apart). We're therefore very happy to announce that your Reader reading list (or any label of your choosing) can now be added as a module to the homepage. To use it, simply click on the "Add it now" button below (you'll have to be signed into your Google Account).

Here's what it looks like:

Like the regular Reader interface, the module remembers what you've read, can sort your reading list in different ways, and allows you to view items by label. Additionally, you can view items directly on the page in a nifty floating bubble. Finally, there's a few non-obvious things you can also do:

• If you add more than one instance of the module, you can tell them to display different labels, use different sorting orders, etc. It's almost like building your own Reader interface.
• You can use mouse scroll wheel (when hovering over module) to scroll the item list up and down.
• You can click the "edit" link and customize many things about the module.

P.S. Just wanted to give a shout-out to Nick Lothian, who had written an unofficial Reader homepage module much earlier on, tiding our users over. Thanks Nick!

P.P.S. If you're looking for a way to move your homepage feed modules over to Google Reader, this OPML export module comes in handy.

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:

• Popular videos (Google Video)
• Top rated (YouTube)
• Recommended Picks (Google Video)
• "Jump"-ing videos via search (Google Video)
• Recently featured (YouTube)
• Most discussed this week (YouTube)
• Google Reader team's recommendations
  (YouTube and Google Video spliced feed)

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.

View your reading lists in new ways

3/25/2006 10:26:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Everything that you see in Reader is available as an Atom feed. While that's normally only of interest to Atom fetishists, it does mean that you can view your reading list in new and interesting ways.

Reading lists as screensavers

Mac OS X Tiger has a nifty screensaver that can display any feed with cool swooshing text. Here's how to view your reading list in it:

1. Using Safari 2.0, load your reading list feed
2. Add a bookmark for that feed
3. in the "Desktop & Screen Saver" preference pane, select "RSS Visualizer"
4. From the "Options..." sheet, pick your reading list
5. Enjoy your new screensaver!

Windows users shouldn't despair, there are plenty of options for that platform too.

Reading lists as Live Bookmarks

Firefox has a neat feature where feeds can be viewed as Live Bookmarks. This means that you have your reading list, your starred items, or even any label can be one click away in the toolbar. To use this feature, use Reader to navigate to the label you want to use. Then click on the feed icon in the upper right corner and choose "Add '<your name>'s starred items" Live Bookmark". You should now have that item in the toolbar, as pictured on the left.

Reading lists for podcasts

Reader has had an inline podcast player for a while. However, one of the core attractions of podcasts is that they can be taken on the go. As a web app, Reader can't really function as a podcatcher. However, this doesn't mean that you have have two completely separate lists of subscriptions, one in Reader and one in your podcatcher.

1. Subscribe to your favorite podcasts and give them a label such as "podcast"
2. Using our sharing feature, make that label public
3. Copy that label's feed URL
4. In iTunes, select "Subscribe to Podcast..." from the "Advanced" menu and paste in the feed URL.
5. You will now have a feed that lists all your items from Reader, so you don't have to worry about keeping it up to date in iTunes.

While we used iTunes as an example, this should work with any application that supports Atom 1.0.

Reader learns to share

3/21/2006 09:51:00 PM

Posted by Jason Shellen, Product Manager

Mom always taught us to share and now we know why, because it's fun. As of tonight, Google Reader has the ability to share what you like to read with your friends. You can send a link to your starred items in Reader, or you can put a clip on your blog with recent items from your reading list (as shown below).

Give this a little test drive if you like, preview 'My starred items' in Google Reader. If you like my list you can subscribe to it from the preview screen.

Additionally, if you use the tagging labeling feature of Reader, you can label items and share them. For instance, I mark all of the blogs I read from my hipster friends in Reader 'hipsters' (if my hipster friends aren't your speed try my tech list). Even if your friends use a feed reader other than Google Reader, we won't be upset. You can direct them to a feed of any of your shared labels.

You control the privacy or shared nature of your lists. To begin sharing your reading lists or add a clip to your blog, go to reader.google.com and open the Share tab. Check the 'shared' check box to opt-in to sharing your starred items or selected labels. Enjoy!

Update on 3/23 by Mihai: I've posted some more techy information about sharing on my blog.

Rest your eyes for a bit

3/13/2006 04:12:00 PM

Posted by Jason Shellen, Product Manager

The Reader engineering team needs to do a little planned maintenance tonight so Reader will be unavailable during that time, but we should be back up around midnight PST. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience.

Update: Reader came back online around 10:15 p.m. Thank you for your patience, we will try to give more advance notice in the future.

Your Labels, Your Way

2/01/2006 12:15:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Reader has supported labels since the very beginning, but they haven't always been easy to get to. To make them more accessible, we've added a drop-down menu at the top of the page, allowing you to get to any of your labels with just a couple of clicks. Keyboard fans shouldn't worry, we've covered that angle too. Simply hit g then l to bring up the label selector:

Type in a label name and/or use the arrow keys to select a label. Once you've selected your desired label, hit the return key to load it. Quicksilver fans may recognize and appreciate the interaction style. We've also added a few more g keyboard shortcuts to make getting around easier, refer to the complete list.

Some other changes and bug fixes we've made recently:

• You can hover over item titles in left side list to view them in a tooltip - useful when longer titles are cropped.
• The "keep unread" checkbox works once again in Internet Explorer.
• Don't reset the window scroll position for some keyboard shortcuts (like scan down/up).
• Improved sorting and filtering in the subscriptions drawer.
• Better error messages for empty and not found feeds.

Stay tuned for more fun things in the near future.

XML Errors in Feeds

12/23/2005 09:50:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Dealing with the millions of RSS and Atom feeds out there is hard work. We're not trying to make you feel sorry for the Reader team, but as anyone who has attempted to implement a feed parser knows, there are many subtle deviations from the spec that you have to handle if you want to have any hope of satisfying the needs of your users (who shouldn't have to care about such things).

The feed generating/parsing world has had the debate about Postel's Law, as it applies to XML and feeds, several times. We are not here to weigh in on either side of the argument. Instead, we hope to provide some data so that such discussions can be made on more than philosophical grounds. Without further ado, here are the top XML errors that we have encountered when parsing all of the feeds that our users have added to Reader (and there are a lot of them):

% of errors	Error description
15.6%	Input claims to be UTF-8 but contains invalid characters.
14.9%	Opening and ending tags mismatch
13.9%	An undefined entity is used (e.g.   in an XML document without importing the HTML set)
7.8%	Documented expected to begin with a start tag, but no < was found
5.7%	Disallowed control characters present
5.5%	Extra content at the end of the document
4.2%	Unterminated entity reference (missing semi-colon)
4.2%	Unquoted attribute value
3.8%	Premature end of data in tag (truncated feed)
3.3%	Naked ampersand (should be represented as &amp;)
2.1%	XML declaration allowed only at the start of the document
1.8%	Namespace prefix is used but not defined
0.75%	Comment not terminated
0.64%	Attribute without value
0.17%	Unescaped < not allowed in attributes values
0.11%	Malformed numerical entity reference
0.11%	Unsupported/invalid encoding
0.10%	Comment must not contain '--'
0.10%	Attribute defined more than once
0.07%	Char out of allowed range
0.03%	Comment not terminated
0.02%	Sequence ]]> not allowed in content

As a whole, about seven percent of all feeds that we know about have some of these errors (this data is based on a one-day snapshot, so transient errors may be present). Note that these are all XML errors, meaning that the feed is not well-formed. We are not talking about complying with and validating against the RSS or Atom specs - that is an even higher bar than we have set here. In general, our recommendation to feed producers is to use the work that the community has put into the feed validator.

On a related note, we're aware that Reader has some issues with titles. It's great that there are test cases, and we will add this bug to our to-do list.

Why should text have all the fun?

12/15/2005 11:58:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

We at the Reader team like to receive some visual stimulation with our reading, so we're subscribed to a bunch of photo feeds. It's great that RSS and Atom can deliver more than just text, but it gets boring to view everything in the exact same fashion.

We've therefore come up with what we call "photo templates," which is a special display mode we have for photo sites. When it's triggered, we try our best to expand thumbnails to full-size photos. Additionally, on the right side of the screen we display a list of clickable thumbnails of other photos from that feed, so that you can cherry-pick the best ones to view. Right now we support the feeds from a few sites; here's a list of them and a sample feed from each one:

• Buzznet - sample feed
• Flickr - sample feed
• Fotki - sample feed
• smugmug - sample feed
• Textamerica.com - sample feed

This is great if you use one of these photo services, but what about other sites or self-hosted photo blogs? For now we've specifically whitelisted the above five sites for photo template support. This doesn't scale that well - there's thousands of sites and only a few overworked Reader engineers.

Our plan is to support the Media RSS extension to RSS and Atom (the thumbnail and content tags are most relevant to photo feeds). This way, if you include the right tags, Reader will be able to display your feed with the photo template without us having to do any work. The Media RSS spec is pretty thorough, and you can use Flickr's feeds as examples of usage.

Subscribing to feeds via little Google buttons

11/28/2005 10:20:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

The web is full of little buttons these days. Little buttons pop up everywhere to email an article, watch a video, play a song, post to your blog, or bookmark a site. They can claim affiliation to various ideas, communities, or ideologies. Browsing the web these days with an eye towards looking at these tiny, active buttons is almost zoological in nature.

See!→

In recent days we added a little button to the button zoo. Google is now offering a little "Add to Google" button which you can put on your site, blog, or corner of the web that can make it easy for people to subscribe to your feed. Here's some instructions for adding the button to your site.

If you'd prefer more direct links from your browser (and if you are a bit brave) you can try dragging any of the following bookmarklets to your links toolbar. Now here's something funny: some feedreaders strip out potentially malicious scripting as can exist in bookmarklets. Google Reader is one, so if you're reading this post from there, you'll have to visit our blog to get 'em. After adding them, you can click them to preview the site you're visiting in Reader and easily subscribe to it. We can't issue a warranty on this approach 'cause we might change something since Reader isn't yet 2 months old. (A toddler!)

• → Subscribe - Views the first available feed in Google Reader.
• → Show all feeds - Lists all feeds and links them to Google Reader. Sadly this link won't work in IE6 with SP2 due to recent changes Microsoft has been making to provide a more secure browser. If you're using Internet Explorer then we recommend skipping this one.

We have our eye on further solutions for one-click subscriptions and like many others we're looking into ways we can help but for now we hope a little button makes for happier subscribing and reading.

May we get you some chips and a soda too?

11/09/2005 06:18:00 PM

Posted by Jason Shellen, Product Manager

It turns out some folks, like Reader-fan Moebius, are enjoying Reader in new ways:

I don't like to use my laptop on my lap, because of heat and other reasons, and I don't like to be pushing the 'J' key very often, so I downloaded "JoyToKey" to use my gamepad for browsing Google Reader. With JoyToKey I mapped "J" to down and "K" to up, "V" to right, and "Ctrl-W" to left. The other joystick was mapped to other normal browser commands. So, I can read Google News very comfortably sitted on my sofa.

Watch out for gamepad thumb and that other RSS.

Warning: Geekery ahead!

11/03/2005 12:39:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

You may have noticed that some Greasemonkey scripts broke with the recent release (for example, the excellent Google Reader Auto-Read). First, a bit of background. Reader uses JavaScript. A lot of it. So much that it would take a while to download even on a broadband connection. What we (and other Google products) do is to compress it before sending it to the user. So this line of code:

FR_Queue_currentQueue.pageDown();

becomes:

t.ma()

Only people care about descriptive names like pageDown; to a computer, ma is just as good. It turns out that these compressed names will change from release to release, as we tweak the code (the more often a name is used, the shorter the compressed name that's chosen for it). Greasemonkey scripts that rely on these compressed names (like the aforementioned one) will therefore break.

So far the situation sounds pretty dire. How can more stable scripts be written? The answer turns out be quite simple. Reader has UI controls for most things that you'd want to do from a script. For example, if you want to automatically move the queue down, you can think of that as being equivalent to the user clicking the "Down" button repeatedly. Those buttons have IDs that we promise won't change without a good reason. Through JavaScript, you can simulate user clicks. Therefore, if your Greasemonkey scripts relies on them, you'll be all set. To give an example, I've written a modified version of the auto-read script that uses this method. It has code like the following (the simulateClick function is included in the script):

simulateClick(getNode("queue-down"));

I hope this helps other Greasemonkey scripts authors that are trying to tweak Reader (and other sites too).

P.S. We just pushed a new Reader release. No new features, but we have fixed a few bugs with unsubscribing and keeping things unread.