As I noted before, I wasn’t too crazy with Google Reader’s new sidebar. So I decided to do something about it. Go out and grab Greasemonkey (if you haven’t already) and then install this script. Here’s a screenshot:

I logged in to catch up on my feeds the other night and found that Google has done a major update to their Reader application.

While I do understand that the previous version of Reader was pretty anemic in functionality (I sort of considered that part of Reader’s charm), it is dissappointing they decided to be just like every other RSS reader out there. It now has the obligatory feed tree on the left hand side, which is pretty useless if you prefer to read news in the river of news style that was the center piece of the original Reader UI. There is also way too much blue on screen, and I found myself getting lost when I cycle through posts because of the auto-expand feature. Also gone is the ‘keep unread’ feature, which I used quite often in the old UI (the new UI also seems to have problems with keep unread items if you had some marked as such before you switched over).

However, all is not bad. Reader now list posts in a format very similar to Gmail, with the benefit of being able to see more posts on screen than with the previous UI. Cycling through posts also seems to be much more responsive than before.

Overall, I think the change is a pretty good step forward for Google Reader as it now has all the features you commonly see with other aggregators, and the UI is comparable if not better than most online aggregators out there. Hopefully, Google will make the necessary changes for the UI to be a better experience for those of us who prefers the river of news style of reading.

Up until now, Google Reader has been very effective in keeping me caught up with my subscribed feeds, but as my number of feeds continue to grow, the limitation in the Reader UI is becoming more and more apparent.

Since the thought of going back to the classic 2- or 3-pane reader makes me want to stop reading RSS altogether, I decided to give the Google Reader API a shot and see if I could come up with a UI that would better suit my reading habits.

The result of a few days of work resulted in this Reader FP bookmarklet. While there’s still a lot of work to be done to make this the UI I originally envisioned, it is currently usable for me as a replacement for the current Google Reader UI. Here are some of its features:

• The colors are a little softer on the eyes
• The fonts are larger (again better for my eyes)
• The main column shows all the post and their contents (up to 20 entries), this allows me to scan the contents of more the than one post at a time.
• The second column shows the titles of all the posts, group by the feed. A Mark All as Read functionality is available for those feeds that I only occasionally read.

The idea here is to use the second column to scan all available posts by title, and to take out anything I’m not interested in reading. For those feeds that only occasionally have posts I want to read, I use the Mark All as Read functionality to get rid a lot of post quickly.

It’s looking pretty good so far, and I have a couple more features I plan to add – keyboard shortcuts, saving/starring posts. I’ve only tested this bookmarklet on Firefox – I seriously doubt it would work in IE.

Here’s a screenshot of what FP looks like: