Google Reader (Part Two)…
In my last post I wrote about the usefulness of Google Reader and how to manage some of the basics. In this post I want to continue with that theme and write about some of the other features it has.
Keep Unread - Sometimes you just don’t have quite the time to read an article that you thought, but you don’t want to star it and come back to it when you process starred items. All you want to do is to make sure that when you are next in Google Reader that it starts off where you left off. That’s where the ‘keep unread’ feature comes in handy. Simply check the box and the article will remain ‘unread’ until you next load that feed.
Search - How often did you know you read something but can’t find it again? Well the ’search’ feature in Google Reader has to be one the best things ever. Simply type in a few keywords into the search box and Google Reader will find every old article that contains those keywords. And it’s quick. And it’s accurate. It just works…
List View - Don’t want to see all the content of articles, but just want to see the headers and scroll through them? Then switch from ‘expanded view’ to ‘list view’. Then simply click on the article you want to read and it will switch to ‘expanded view’ for that article.
Trends - I like all the trending statistics that are available on Google Reader. You can discover things like ‘how many posts does a particular feed make each day?’; ‘what’s the percentage of posts I read from a particular feed?’; ‘which feeds do I read the most?’; ‘what days of the week do I read the most posts?’; ‘what days of the week are the most posts made?’; and lots more besides. Give it a try.
There are also tools to set up subscriptions to feeds, re-order your feeds, create ‘folders’ to group feeds, unsubscribe to feeds, and all the rest of those management tasks you’re going to need.
All in all, Google Reader is an extremely comprehensive and mature RSS feed reader and I would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone considering managing the Internet articles they read on a daily basis. Quite simply, I have one place I can go to now and get all the information I want on all the topics that interest me. It’s taken me about a year to get the feed set to exactly what I want through trial and error, but now it saves me a ton of time and keeps me totally up to date. It’s also available as a mobile feed so you can read it on your phone if you’re that kind of a news junkie!
In my next article I’ll give you a round up of the actual feeds I subscribe to - just in case you’re interested…
