9 Cool Google Reader Tips And Tricks

Here are 9 cool Google Reader tricks to make reading 500 feeds a cinch:

J and K - The J key on your keyboard can be used to go directly to the next item, and the K key goes back.

GA - If you hold down the G and A keys Google Reader will go straight to the “all items” page. This in addition to J and K can really speed things up substantially.

Show Only Updated Feeds - Why show all feeds when you can show just the updated ones? The option is at the top of the item list in the sidebar.

Dashboard Widget - Use OS X? Why not get the Google Reader dashboard widget.

Use Firefox - Firefox always seems to do AJAXy stuff a lot better than other browsers.

Temporarily Star Interesting Items - Something I am starting to do more and more is to temporarily star interesting items. Basically if I am quickly looking through 100+ items I will star items that might be worth writing about using the ‘S’ keyboard shortcut. You can also quickly go into the starred items page by holding ‘GS’.

Use Trends! - Once a month or so I use trends to find feeds that are fairly inactive, and get rid of them if there hasn’t been anything new in a long time. Kinda pointless to keep them, right?

Backup - Lately Google has had quite a few issues with people losing feeds and such, an easy way to avoid those problems is to back up your data. Go into the Setting page, and click Import/Export. There you can backup or restore your feeds. Note: It doesn’t save what items are read or not.

And lastly…

Use Bookmarklets!

Google has made a bunch of free bookmarklets available under the “goodies” tab in settings. The only one I usually use is the subscribe one on the bottom of the page.

Please subscribe, or else I will cry. Do you really want to make a programmer cry?