One subscriber, two subscribers, three...

2/16/2007 06:16:00 AM

Posted by Justin Haugh, Software Engineer

When building a product, your top priority should always be the needs of your users. Here on the Google Reader team, we pride ourselves in being responsive to the complaints and feature requests of those who read feeds using our service. Today, though, we're announcing a feature for a different group: the publishers of those feeds.

Publishers have been asking us to report the number of users that are subscribed to their feeds in Google Reader. This is something we've been wanting to do for a while, but with all the products that use feeds at Google, corralling the data in one place was like herding cats. So herd we did, and as of today, our crawler reports the number of Google users subscribed to the feed. The count includes subscribers from Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage, and in the future may include other Google products that support feeds.

If you have access to your server logs, you can see the count directly in the HTTP header of our requests (read more in our FAQ). For an easier solution, you can use a web analytics service such as FeedBurner to get a detailed breakdown of your subscribers from a variety of feed readers (it may take a day or two for our stats to show up in their interface, so don't worry if they're not there yet).

While you're at it, you may want to take a look at the new Google Reader for Publishers page. It has some helpful tips to ensure the best experience for your subscribers. Among other things, it explains feed best practices, common implementation pitfalls, and various ways to promote your feeds.

We intend to develop more features for feed publishers, so let us know what would be most useful to you.

By Bloggers For Bloggers

2/01/2007 01:40:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

Reader has always been about sharing your favorite items. One of the more fun things you can do with them is put them on your blog. That way your readers can see what you've been finding interesting, even if you don't have the time to do full posts.

Until now, putting your shared items in your blog required some technical chops, since you needed to copy and paste some code into your template. We'd always wanted to make this easier, so we worked with our friends on the Blogger team. As a result, the entire process now only takes a few clicks for Blogger users*.

All you have to do is click the "Add to Blogger" button on the put a clip on your site page in Reader (found in Settings). Now anytime you share something, your blog's readers will know about it too. It's more fun than a blogroll and always up to date.

* Just to be clear, this only works if you've upgraded to the new version of Blogger. We switched the Reader blog to it a few weeks ago, and it's been working out great (no more waiting for publishing to finish).

Getting embedded in Google Reader.

1/30/2007 11:29:00 AM

Posted by Chris Wetherell, Software Engineer

We have another small update to Reader regarding video. Reader should now show videos from YouTube and Google Video (and a few other sites) that you have embedded in your blog posts and articles. Some advice on how not to go about filming a feature announcement is included below. (Shot at Sundance Film Festival, too late for awards submission.)

We didn't want this to be just a Google thing, however, so we also currently support videos from other sites like MySpace, Jumpcut, Grouper, IFILM, Metacafe, Revver, Vimeo, vSocial, and games from Monsters and Critics. If your favorite site isn't listed, please tell us in the Reader group and we'll look into adding support, if possible.

Update on 2/7/2007: We now also support Odeo, Yahoo! Video, Brightcove, Dailymotion, blip.tv and MSN Soapbox embedded players.

Some of our engineers don't work at Google

1/17/2007 12:04:00 PM

Posted by Nick Baum, Product Manager

One of the most useful aspects of feed readers is how easy they make it to keep track of industry news. Which in my case means using Google Reader to read about... Google Reader. For example, I subscribe to the Google Blogsearch for "Google Reader" (which has a feed) so I know whenever someone writes about our product.

In the TV show 24, everything is not as it seems. Similarly, not everything that can be done with Reader is visible at first glance. I thought I'd share some gems that were unearthed with the help of the Blogsearch feed.

• Mitch Keeler has posted a great guide of various external tools that people have written for Google Reader, including notifiers, greasemonkey scripts and more.
• For those of you with Wordpress blogs, Mike Crute has written a Wordpress plugin to add his shared items to his template.
• John Tokash is developing Reader Mini, an interface optimized for Nokia Internet Tablets.
• Lots of people have been posting their Trends statistics: Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, O'Reilly Radar and more. Jeff Veen, who helped us out with the design, has also posted some follow-up thoughts.

The Google Reader team tries to read all the feedback that gets posted on blogs, and has also been known to reply in comments. This is a great way for us to get a feel for what's important to you, so keep writing up your thoughts and feature suggestions. There's also our Google Group if you'd like to report more specific issues.

I like big charts and I cannot lie

1/03/2007 04:03:00 PM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

I've always been a big fan of charts, tables and other ways of analyzing and visualizing data. On my own blog I will often plot things just to get a handle on them. Even here I've posted some analyses that I've done of the data that the Reader team has on hand. It's therefore no surprise that my favorite blog of 2006 is Data Mining.

With this in mind, I've always wondered how I could apply this interest to Reader's feature set. It then occurred to me that there were plenty of things that could be dug up about the items that a person reads and the feeds they are subscribed to. Perhaps some feeds post very often but don't actually get read, so they may as well be removed. Conversely, other sites may not have updated in ages, so they're just taking up room in the list of subscriptions.

Playing around with these ideas, I created a simple Reader "trends" page, inspired by Google Trends as well as the Search History Trends page. After showing it to the rest of the Reader team and a few other interested Googlers, I began to gather feedback and implemented it. Most helpful was when Jeff and Doug rolled up their sleeves and applied some of the same thinking that went into Measure Map to this new Reader page. This went beyond just making things pretty; they helped make things easier to digest and understand.

The result is the Reader Trends page, accessed via a link from the "Home" page. For example, it lets me see the spike in read items two days ago (the result of my New Year's resolution of staying on top of my 322 subscriptions). There are also my subscriptions sorted by various criteria, so I can see which I'm having trouble keeping up with. Each subscription has a unsubscribe icon next to it, which I've used for those that I decided were not worth keeping around.

If you have any New Year's resolutions about time management or are a chart geek like me, trends should be useful and fun. You may discover things about your reading habits that you didn't know.

Dwelling on the past

12/14/2006 06:45:00 PM

Posted by Justin Haugh, Software Engineer

As a backend engineer, one of my favorite features of Google Reader is its ability to track the history of a feed over time. Reader takes a snapshot of feeds periodically and saves the content, so you can see posts that are days or weeks old. It's a neat way to read the web; in a way, it lets you look back in time. Combined with Reader's ability to track what you have and haven't read, you can safely jet off to Tahiti for a few weeks and never miss a post.

Ideally, though, you'd like to catch up on those posts in the order they were written. That's why we're releasing one of our most requested features: sorting by oldest-first. Now you can read those Lost episode summaries in the right order after you've shook the sand out of your shoes. It's available in the view settings menu, so you can select it only for the feeds or folders you prefer.

Careful observers will note that we've also added sort by auto to view settings. This nifty feature mixes feeds together according to posting frequency, so items from rarely-updated feeds (your friend's blog) show up higher than items from frequently-updated feeds like The New York Times. Look for this feature to evolve over time as we try to find other ways of highlighting the most interesting content in your feeds. Enjoy!

Tools to improve your Reader experience

11/14/2006 06:00:00 AM

Posted by Mihai Parparita, Software Engineer

As an engineer, one of the things that warms my heart is when users of my product become invested enough in it to want to extend it. I was very happy to see that Reader has begun to attract all sorts of hacks and add-ons that tweak the application to better suit the usage patterns of particular people. It's hard to make an interface that is everything to everyone, and add-ons like these are our best hope of making Reader the ideal feed aggregator for the largest number of people.

Here are a few add-ons that we've discovered recently:

Google Reader Notifier (Mac): This open-source application adds a menu-bar icon which keeps track of new items within your entire reading list or just for a particular tag (the latter is useful for people like me that are subscribed to a lot of feeds and want to know only when the important ones are updated). Troels Bay, the author, has been revving the application on a regular basis, and it's getting better and better.

Gordita: Reader has one-click starring and sharing of items, but you may want to do the same to pages outside of Reader. Gordita lets you create a bookmarklet that allows you to copy Reader items that interest you to del.icio.us, along with all the other items you've bookmarked over the Web.

Google Reader Optimized: This set of user styles maximizes the reading area. When you want to sit down and power through hundreds of items, you may find this compact, stripped-down interface preferable.

Controlling Google Reader with a Cell Phone : This add-on may be a bit out there, but in a nutshell it allows you to control Reader with your Bluetooth cellphone. Perhaps if used in combination with the full-screen style above, you can build your own Reader 10-foot user interface.

Reader Button for the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer: If you use the Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer, this custom button gives you one-click access to Reader and notifies you of new items via a changing icon.

Updated at 11am with the Toolbar button.

The post-interview interview

11/02/2006 05:52:00 PM

Posted by Nick Baum, Software Engineer

After I convinced Chris to star in our little intro video, he couldn't wait to turn the tables on me:

(click here to watch the post-interview interview)

Here are links to some recent interviews:

• Podtech.net interview with Robert Scoble
• Demo of Google Reader features
• Informal coffee-shop interview for The Blogging Times

Also, some of you may have had trouble accessing your Reader account this morning. There was some flakiness at one of our datacenters , but the problem was resolved within an hour. Sorry for the inconvenience -- you can rest assured that we're constantly working to improve our reliability and performance.

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.