It’s not often for me to admit my addictions, but at this moment in time I’ll give in to an exception to the rule.

I’m an RSS junkie, information addict, news lover, and serial procrastinator, whatever you want to call it. The majority of my time on the Internet is spent reading numerous RSS feeds through the wonder that is Google Reader. While many may enjoy this pastime without fail, some things about Google’s creation irritate me immensely, which is why I’ve come round to writing this article.

Mainly to suggest some improvements to their reader, and make my life easier (selfish I know), but I feel many will agree with my propositions.

Firstly and most foremost, the “settings” page is abysmal. It’s honestly one of the most frustrating experiences I have when using the reader. Organising you feeds is slow and arduous and you can’t delete multiple feeds at the click of a button, you have to manually click the “trash” can for each one.

Another one of those irritations is the unnecessary time wasted looking for “unassigned to tags” feeds. While Google have conveniently placed a button to pre-select those in question, you still have to scroll down a list to find the checked boxes. A laborious task if there’s over 50 subscriptions in your list.

So, I have proposed two solutions to correct this problem.

1. Use the “dynamic” search feature to single out unassigned feeds.

The search bar on the right of the screen can be used to filter out your subscriptions as you continue to type. So for example, if you wanted to see all feeds in filed under a certain tag, you’d simply type the name of the tag and the list will reduce to those that are under it.

So why can’t we simply type “unassigned” or “untagged” to filter out those of the type? Surely this isn’t too hard of a task to implement?

2. Making the “sidebar” more fluid.

What I mean by this can be demonstrated in the following screen shot (please excuse my poor Photoshop skills) : -

Many will argue that this will complicate and move away from the minimalistic simplicity that Google reader holds, but it’s a feature that I’d love to see put into action. Imagine being able to drag and drop your feeds into different tags, organising your collection quickly and efficiently while remaining within the confines of the reader itself.

Now that that’s out of the way, maybe it’s time to move onto less important matters; the lack of themes. To me, the application is a bit dry, a bit lacking in design. Would it be that hard for google to implement a quick skinning system? They did it for iGoogle.

Well, this point is kind of a moot for me as I use a specially designed skin that works with a Firefox plugin called Stylish. This is a zero sum solution however, because the whole thing will become void should Google change their mark-up. The skin in question changes the reader to a much cleaner (and easier on the eye) OSX style interface, that can be downloaded from here.

In effect, the points raised above are my only gripes with Google Reader and my hope is the developers will take note of this or present their own solutions to the problems that crop up within it.

Even if they don’t, I’ll continue to use Google reader as I see it as the only workable solution out there, which I applaud the developers for whole heartedly.

Anyone got any suggestions for improvement?

Tags: change, coding, design, firefox, General, google, reader, rss Technology