Written on Friday, June 29th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
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.
Written on Tuesday, June 12th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
A while back I wrote up a quick PHP script for RSS parsing. Earlier today I decided to wrap it in a nice easily-customizable class. You can see it in action here. You can either download the code here or just copy and paste it from below:
<?php
class RSSParser {
var $insideitem = false;
var $tag = "";
var $title = "";
var $description = "";
var $link = "";
var $num = 0;
var $before_item = "<li>"; //default before
var $after_tem = "</li>"; //default after
function startElement($parser, $name, $attrs) {
if($this->insideitem) {
$this->tag = $name;
}
else if($name == "ITEM") {
$this->insideitem = true;
}
}
function endElement($parser, $name) {
if ($name == "ITEM") {
printf("$this->before_item<a href='%s'>%s</a>$this->after_tem",trim($this->link),htmlspecialchars(trim($this->title)));
$this->title = "";
$this->description = "";
$this->link = "";
$this->insideitem = false;
$this->num++;
}
}
function characterData($parser, $data) {
if($this->insideitem) {
switch($this->tag) {
case "TITLE":
$this->title .= $data;
break;
case "DESCRIPTION":
$this->description .= $data;
break;
case "LINK":
$this->link .= $data;
break;
}
}
}
function RSSParser($feed,$numitems,$before = "<li>",$after = "</li>") {
$this->num = 0;
$this->before_item = $before;
$this->after_item = $after;
$xml_parser = xml_parser_create();
xml_set_object ($xml_parser, $this );
xml_set_element_handler($xml_parser, "startElement", "endElement");
xml_set_character_data_handler($xml_parser, "characterData");
$fp = fopen($feed,"r") or die("Error reading RSS data. Click <a href=$feed>here</a> to view it (with rss reader).");
while (($data = fread($fp, 4096)) && ($this->num < $numitems)) {
xml_parse($xml_parser, $data, feof($fp)) or die("Error parsing RSS data. Click <a href=$feed>here</a> to view it (with rss reader).");
}
fclose($fp);
xml_parser_free($xml_parser);
}
}
?>
<html>
<body>
<ul>
<?php
$parser = new RSSParser("http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni/",10); //default vals for before and after are <li> and </li>, no need to enter them
?>
</ul>
</body>
</html>
Written on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
I was thinking last night, since I don’t have any posts written up for today (a big no-no), why not recap some of the better posts? So, here is a fairly long (24 item) list of the best of Nusuni.com:
SEO Tips
Top Five Search Engine Optimization Myths - A list of some of the top SEO myths, a pretty popular post, mostly because I wrote it for ProBlogger’s group writing project.
Google PageRank For Newbies - The absolute beginners’ guide to PageRank.
25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips - Thanks to this post I had to chase down over 50 sploggers. Most of them I told to simply quote it and toss over a few links to this site, I figured let someone else pull out the DMCA card, I had better things to do.
Long Tail Search Optimization - Definitely in the top 10 posts here. Most explanations of long-tail search optimization are long and boring, I managed to write about it in a few simple paragraphs.
General Tips
Controversy 101 - How to use controversy to make your site more popular.
Why Anarchy Is Bad For The Internet - Anyone who thinks Anarchy is a good thing is an idiot.
A Warning About “Make Massive Money” Scam Sites - The obvious truth about most make massive money websites.
Common Pro-Splogging Arguments (And Why They Are Wrong) - The title says it all.
Website Administration And Marketing
Huge List Of Web Development Acronyms - There are still about 55 things I can add to that list…
StumbleUpon Advertising Is A Waste Of Money - StumbleUpon users hate that post yet they keep giving it a thumbs up, oh well. More traffic for me 
Text Link Services Vs Manually Selling Links - Which one do you think is better? It’s obvious what I like…
How To Move A WordPress Install To A Different Server Without Losing A Single Reader - Pretty obvious but most people still don’t realize it.
Copyrights Explained - Pretty much everything you’ve ever wanted to know about copyrights.
Modern Web Design - What People Want In The Web 2.0 Era - A look at Web 2.0 web page design.
The Cost Of Using Images: Problems And Solutions - A nice list of a bunch of the major issues with using images and how to fix them or avoid them altogether.
Creating A RSS Landing Page - Why RSS landing pages can be useful.
Misc.
A Look At The First Three Months Of 2007 And My Plans For The Rest Of The Year - Boy, this post had a long enough title…
10 reasons why computer makers annoy me - A post from my original Blogspot blog.
Surge Protectors and Their Uses - Those cheapy $20 surge protectors do not protect your electronics from lightning. If they did why is it none of them have real “guarantees”?
Internet Myth: Target is Run by the French - Target is a good old fashioned American business, it did not start in France and it is not run by the French.
The Great Upstate New York Snow Storm Of 2007 - Wow, we sure got a ton of snow. Thankfully it is all melted now…
Nusuni.com Is 5 Years Old - The domain turned 5 the other day.
Programming/Scripting
Using Abstract Methods In PHP - I love abstract methods…
Compilation Explained - The entire process of program compilation and linking explained in a few short paragraphs.
Now Get Reading!
Oh, and please share this post too… Heck, even a Digg or Stumble would work *cough*
Written on Tuesday, March 6th, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
I just recently switched all the feed reader buttons to a simple javascript popup menu. Here is the code if you are interested.
<form action=""><select onchange="window.location = this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;">
<option value="">Subscribe In...</option>
<option value="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> Google Reader</option>
<option value="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> Bloglines</option>
<option value="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> My Yahoo!</option>
<option value="http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> Netvibes</option>
<option value="http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription?resource=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> Rojo</option>
<option value="http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> AOL</option>
<option value="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nusuni"> Everything Else</option>
</select></form>
Written on Friday, March 2nd, 2007 by Jeremy Steele
Some developers released a Mac OS X Tiger Dashboard widget that can be used for Google Reader.
Check it out
