Google Reader is undoubtedly my favorite online RSS feed reader but I am still in awe that Google hasn’t made a notifier for it and their Calendar. Of course a Firefox extension, called the Google Reader Toolkit, has finally popped up that will notify you when there are unread items in your Reader. It isn’t quite as extensive as I would have liked to see (a listing of the new items in a slider window would be nice) but I guess I can’t really complain when it is free. If you do decide to use this extension it is important for you to know that it is not compatible with the Gmail Manager Firefox extension.
The other tool that I have for you is a Greasemonkey script that will pull up the actual website in Google Reader instead of showing the text from the feed. This can be especially useful if you have a lot of sites in your Reader that do not supply the full feed. To use this you’ll have to be viewing Google Reader in the “List View” and not the expanded view. This makes sense because if you used this in the expanded view it would take forever to load all of the feed items. It would be cool if this script didn’t actually replace the feed content and instead offered a link that you could click to open the site within the current view, but it is great nonetheless.
I hope more and more people continue to develop tools that make Google Reader even more useful and most of all I would love to see synchronization capabilities for RSS desktop software. That kind of stuff probably won’t start to become prominent until more people realize what feeds actually are but it looks like the world is slowly warming up to the idea.
Ryan, I don’t see the link for the greasemonkey script. I went looking but still couldn’t find it. Is it my Monday morning eyes?
Oops
Must have been my Monday morning fingers.
I added the link to the article or you can just [userscripts.org]
Thanks Ryan. It’s nice to know there are other humans on this planet with me
And when I installed the script I saw in Firefox 2 the notice in the status bar when the script was installed successfully. Cool!
Yep, I can proofread all I want but there are just some things that my mind auto-corrects and prevents me from noticing.
Glad you got the script up and running without any troubles. Greasemonkey is a really nice tool and makes it easy to add all kinds of sweet features to sites. If there is something that annoys you on a site do a search on the userscripts.org and you’ll probably find something to fix the problem. There is an over-abundance of Google scripts on there as well.
These extensions are nice, but Google should be doing something themselves. Whatever happened to their promise of integrating their services and making their content available to anyone, anywhere? Honestly, these guys are getting like MS
.
I have my faith that Google is currently working their butts off to get everything integrated and then they are going to release one amazing suite that encompasses all of their products. I can dream can’t I?