How to mark all posts as read in Google Reader
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
Step Into a Warm Shower Faster
I’ve been reading the new LifeHacker blog by Gawker, and I’m really diggin’ it. It’s basically tips for everyday life, geared toward, well, mostly geeks.
Anyway, I’m not sure if this would qualify, but it’s a little “hack” that I’ve been using for awhile now, and I quite like it.
Don’t you hate waiting for the water to warm up in the morning when you go to have your shower? In my house it can take close to 30 seconds for the water to start warming up. So, what I do is run the hot water tap while I’m brushing my teeth.
It’s the pipes between the hot water heater and your shower spout that keep the water cold for so long. The water that is still in the pipe is completely cold, and even after hot water starts flowing through them, the pipes take a bit of time to warm up themselves. By running the hot water in the sink before you go to get in the shower, you ensure that the pipes are warm all the way to the bathroom. The shower takes mere seconds to warm up after that.
Silly little thing, but it works for me.
Blog Post Titles Matter
[Update]
I’m changing the title on this post, because it was a good example of what I would consider to be a bad headline!
Old title: Extra! Extra! Read All About It!! New title: Blog Post Titles Matter The server stats should give me an idea if this post is more popular now that it’s named more accurately, as I suspect it will be. Gotta practise what I preach, right?
[Original Post]
Blogging is not news reporting. Blogging will not replace the traditional news media. But bloggers should still pay attention to the very real lessons that are to be learned from the traditional news media, particularly the print media.
When most people read a newspaper, they scan the pages for something that jumps out and catches their eye. There are two things that can reliably do this: an interesting picture, or an interesting headline.
Pictures - being worth a thousand words - are fairly self explanatory. They are visual, and pull the reader in.
Headlines don’t have that same quality, yet benefit from their status as an obvious label for the content that follows.
Readers are trained to scan headlines first, and this holds true more than you may realize when it comes to blogs. Many people subscribe to literally hundreds of blogs through RSS feeds. They can’t realistically read each and every post, so they scan. They scan the titles of the posts, or headlines, to be exact.
So, you must ask yourself: What do my headlines say?
(Of course, I’d do well to take my own advice… my last post was called “Ballmer and the Volcanoe”… what the hell is that?!)
Computer Myths - True or Bogus?
PC World has a wonderful article that takes aim at some of the most prevalent myths that seem to circulate time and time again. Here are some of the ones they take on:
Each myth is rated on a “Bogus-O-Meter”, and generally discussed with an industry expert. Great reading.
Simple Googling Tip
This a really simple way to improve your success rate when trying to find something using Google (or any other search engine, for that matter). In fact, it’s so simple that many people already do it, and those of you who don’t may wonder how you got by without this technique. In fact, I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself to use it more often.
When we’re searching for something on the web, and the results from our search query are not at all what we had expected or hoped to see, many of us immediately modify our query to include more or different words. But often the problem with the results that were returned is that they are full of references to material that is appropriate for the words used in the search query, but in an entirely different context. So, sometimes the thing to do is to remove words - not from your query, but from the results set.
Consider a (completely hypothetical) situation where you are searching for information about your house’s windows, but are generating search results with information about the Windows operating system. Rather than trying to find better words for “windows”, why not tell the search engine that you’re not interested in any results that contain the words “Microsoft” or “XP”? It may well turn out that your original search query perfect for the job, once the inappropriate words or phrases had been filtered out.
To exclude words from being included in search results, simply include a minus sign (-) before the terms you want to exclude. So, in the above example, you might search for:
windows information -microsoft -xp
Note that this is only an example, and I expect this particular search query really blows chunks. But you get the point.
Give it a try!
