Photograph Credit: Wikipedia
How’s your Google Reader working? Well, I hope. Making one stop at your Google Reader to read all the latest news assists you in using your time wisely. If you have missed parts to this series, you can click on these links to catch up: Part 1 – RSS explained, Part 2 – Google Reader setup, and Part 3 – Adding subscriptions.
Hopefully, you have added your favorite sites and have navigated your way between the posts. Today, I will share my 4 favorite ways to customize Google Reader to maximize my time.
1. Use expanded format. On the top right side of your Google Reader, you can choose to show the posts in an expanded or list format. To read the posts in a list format, you click on each one to open the information. In the expanded format, all the information is listed. You only need to scroll down to read each post.
2. Choose ALL ITEMS to “set as start page.” Instead of seeing the HOME page with excerpts of the posts, I choose to view ALL ITEMS when I open my Google Reader. This setting saves me from clicking on ALL ITEMS on each visit.
Here’s how to set your start page:
- Click on ALL ITEMS.
- Locate the VIEW SETTINGS button in the menu bar at the top of your listed posts. Click to see the drop down menu.
- From the drop down menu, select SET AS START PAGE. Now when you open your Google Reader, you will see all the unread posts.
3. Sort posts newest to oldest. You could also choose oldest to newest or by magic. The BY MAGIC option ranks your unread posts by your interests based on your time at Google Reader. The idea is that Google Reader sorts your posts most interesting to you to least interesting to you. Since I find all the posts interesting (which is why I subscribe), I choose the newest to oldest.
If you want to read all the posts from one web site, then click on the web site’s name on the left sidebar under subscriptions, and all the posts from that site will load on the right side of your reader. (NOTE: The viewable items will be the read and unread items in the order you have chosen to sort.)
4. Star items. As I read through the posts, I star items I want to keep for later. After reading through all my posts, I can then go to the left sidebar, select STARRED ITEMS, and all the starred items will be listed. When you are done with a starred post, you can unstar it.
Star Shortcut: Hit “s” while on the post to star and/or unstar it. When starred, the gray or blue star at the top of the post (by the title) and at the bottom of the post will change to yellow. For other keyboard shortcuts, visit Google Reader’s common questions.
There you have it! These are my tips for customizing Google Reader to help me use my time wisely while staying connected to my favorite web sites. If you have other tips or tricks for using Google Reader, please share in the comments. Next week, I will conclude this series with a couple troubleshooting solutions.