Jason Clarke

With the release of Google Calendar, I’m finding myself migrating more and more of my online life into Google apps. Gmail was the first (and still best), Google Personalized Homepage the next, then Google Calendar and now I’m starting to use Google Notebook some. The one that I could never really get into, though, was Google Reader.

Unfortunately, the first thing I did when Google Reader was released was to import my entire 250+ feed OPML file into it. Now, unfortunately the way Google Reader works is that it forces you to look at every single post, so if you have feeds that are very frequently updates, Google Reader is not great at letting you simply skim through them quickly. Almost immediately, my Google Reader account was overwhelmed with thousands of unread posts, and it felt completely out of control. I abandoned it, as I suspect many other people did who went through the same experience.

Since then, the Google Reader team has made a number of improvements, not the least of which was in adding a Google Personalized Homepage module that allows you to read posts from there. Since I use my personalized homepage as my online “home base”, I had to give this a try.

Here’s a big problem: One of the shortcomings in Google Reader is that there is no way to perform bulk actions. So you can’t just mark everything as read, just as you can’t unsubscribe from more than one feed at a time. So I manually unsubscribed from over 250 feeds, then imported a very select few feeds. This did not go without some problems; for example, I’m still receiving new posts for feeds that I removed days ago. But worse still, what remained were hundreds of unread posts that I wanted to but was unable to mark as read en masse.

Greasemonkey to the rescue! I followed a link from the official Google Reader blog that pointed to some Greasemonkey scripts that had been developed for Google Reader. One in particular caught my eye: Google Reader Auto-Read. This Greasemonkey script will allow you to simply click a link, and have it start methodically scrolling through your feeds one post at a time and mark each one as read. You can fire this thing off and work in another tab, or just go to sleep. It’s not fast, and it’s not elegant, but it does the trick. So if you, like me – and Steve Rubel – have the problem of many old and unwanted unread posts in your Google Reader account, give the Google Reader Auto-Read Greasemonkey script a try.

[tags] Google Reader, GReader, Greasemonkey, auto-read, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Personalized Homepage, Google Notepad, Google, Micropersuasion, Steve Rubel [/tags]