I was visiting my parents last weekend when I showed my mother my setup with Google Reader. At this writing I have 38 RSS feeds ranging from Roll Bama Roll to Telegraph’s election coverage to Scott Adams’s Dilbert blog to Charles Krauthammer, all dumped into Google Reader. In a given 24-hour cycle, I would guess around 300-400 new articles are delivered to me, but since 98% of the time all I care about is the headline, I can typically get through a pile of that size in about half an hour. I also like Google Reader because I can “star” or “tag” items for archival (either because I really like the article or because I want to make a special point of reading or re-reading it later), and another feature I find myself using frequently is the ability to quickly email any story to anyone I want.
So Mom is standing over my shoulder, watching me click around in Reader, and she asks me, “How did you ever learn about all this?” I mumbled some nonsense because I really didn’t have a good answer, and then luckily my daughter grabbed our attention, neatly diverting me away from the topic altogether. But, I thought my answer was unfair, and it seemed like Mom was genuinely interested in maybe learning a bit about how to set it up herself. So, I decided to post on my setup and let you, the reader, adapt it to your liking.
First, I would only attempt this with the Firefox web browser, because of its extensions capability. The topic of extensions can be a bit technical and geeky (and will likely be fodder for later posts on this blog), but for now you really don’t need to know any of the under-the-hood stuff. So if you don’t have it, get Firefox now. Installation is pretty simple. I would recommend making it your default browser, and you can spend whatever time you need poking around and getting to know Firefox.
Once Firefox is installed, you’ll also need a couple of extensions to mimic my setup. All you do to install an extension is to open Firefox, navigate to the page containing the extension, click on a link to download the extension file (which ends in *.xpi), and then click “Install” in the dialog box that appears. Firefox will do the installation for you, and all you’ll have to do is restart Firefox. The extensions you’ll need for this exercise are Greasemonkey and Better GReader. I would also recommend LastTab, Tabs Open Relative, and Tab X, which I find make it easier to navigate among tabs.
At this point, it’s time to sign up for a Google account. This is easy - go to Google, click “More”, then click “Reader”. Sign in if you have a Google account. If you don’t have a Google account, there’s a big blue button at the bottom right that says “Create an account” - click that and sign up for an account (which should take about two minutes). Once you’re signed in, you should be taken to the Reader home page. There won’t be too much to do, since you don’t have any feeds yet. One thing I did, though, was click “Settings” and set my “Start page” to “All items” and uncheck the “Always start with the navigation page visible” option. This way every time I go to Reader I am taken directly to a list of all my new articles, and the left-side navigation page is minimized, so I can use a maximum amount of the screen for articles.
Now, in Firefox, click Tools >> Add-ons to bring up the list of your installed extensions. Click the entry for Better GReader and click the “Options” button. You can read the “Help” tab to learn what each item does, but since I’m just telling you how to mimic my setup at this point, in the “General” tab check “Colorful List View”, “Show Feed Favicons”, and “Smart Subscribe”, and uncheck the rest. In the “Skins” tab, I chose “Air Skin”, but this selection really doesn’t matter much. When you’re done, click “OK” and close the Add-ons window.
Now, it’s time to go get some RSS feeds. This is where that “Smart Subscribe” option makes this process dead-easy. All you have to do is go to the sites you like to follow and see if there are feeds available. Most of the time, if there is a feed available, in the upper-right corner of the web page you’ll see a feed icon that looks like this: 
If you hover over that little icon, a list of feed URLs will pop up. All you have to do is pick whichever one you want, and Google Reader will open up with that feed loaded into it. Click the big “Subscribe” button in the middle of Reader, and that feed will be added to your list. That’s all there is to it!
[NOTE: Often there will be multiple formats of the same feed (e.g., RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, Atom). You only need one, and it doesn’t really matter which one. I usually pick the RSS (or RSS 2.0, if there’s more than one RSS) feed, if it’s available.]
Sometimes the little feed icon won’t be there, but there will be RSS content available. Newspapers, TV stations, and blogs almost always have feeds available, so you may have to hunt around a bit. To manually add a feed to Reader, copy the feed’s URL, navigate to Reader, click “Add Subscription” in the navigation bar (you may have to click the little gray triangle on the left side of the screen if the nav bar is hidden), paste the feed URL into the text box, and click the “Add” button.
Keep adding feeds to your heart’s content. If you go to a site and aren’t sure whether you’re subscribed to that site, note the little “Smart Subscribe” feed icon will have a big gray check mark over it if you’re already subscribed to at least one feed offered by that site. Down the road, if you decide you want to unsubscribe from a particular feed, go to Reader, click “Manage Subscriptions” at the bottom of the nav bar, find the feed you want to get rid of, and click the little trash can.
So now I can open Reader, click “show X new items” if necessary (”X” will be a number), and just start scrolling through the headlines of the articles that are new since my last session with Reader. If one catches my attention, I click it to open the article. Sometimes all I see is a little blurb; if that’s not enough, I can click the article title and see the full article in a new tab. (This is why I like the “Tabs Open Relative” extension - the new tab will always be right next to the tab Reader is in.) By the time I scroll all the way to the bottom, I’ve read all of the articles that interest me, and I can safely dump the rest. So, I click the “Mark all as read” button to wipe them out. The page may refresh with a few more articles that have come in during my session, but it doesn’t take but a couple of minutes to get through those. Once I have the “no new articles” message in Reader, I close the tab and move on to something else.
I hope you find this helpful. I’ll write about my Google Calendar setup sometime relatively soon.