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

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!→ Add to Google

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.