Now this one is a lot of fun…
I moved my blog reading from My Yahoo to Google Reader about 6 weeks ago. It has been tough to adjust to the new habit – my instinct is to always go to My Yahoo. But My Yahoo just wasn’t scaling for the number of blogs I like to keep tabs on (now over 100), and I noticed that a majority of the people reading my blog were now using Google.
Thankfully, Firefox has made this easier. The ability to quickly change the behavior of “adding a feed” to Google from My Yahoo made the transition simple for new feeds.
For exporting my old feeds from My Yahoo to Google, I found a nifty tip online on how to export an OPML file from My Yahoo and import into Google Reader. Just spent a few minutes categorizing all my feeds, and I was ready to go.
Well, today I discovered a new trick.
This post shows you how to skin Google Reader using CSS to look like Mac OS X. It’s really neat, although it’s a little weird that the author’s name is Adam Pash.
On Firefox, you basically want to go here and download Stylish. Stylish is an add-on that lets you customize the CSS for any website.
Then, go here to download the Mac OS X theme for Google Reader.
Once you unzip, open the CSS in a text editor, and copy & paste it into Stylish. On Mac OS X, I had to do this manually by opening the Add-Ons dialog, and open the Stylish preferences, but I got it to work.
It’s pretty neat, and I like the new look & feel of Google Reader. It’s also pretty neat to see CSS as a form of “lightweight plug-in” for websites. I’ve got to show this to some of the front-end folks on eBay Express – we use CSS heavily, and I bet you could come up with some pretty neat skins for the site using Stylish.
Out of curiosity, what made you choose Google Reader over Bloglines?
I tried both Google Reader & Bloglines briefly, but I won’t pretend it was a very involved decision. I’ve been watching my own blog’s feed subscriptions over the past few months, and the Google Reader portion has grown tremendously.
Right now, I have about 100 blog feeds that I subscribe to, and for that, Google Reader is doing just fine.
My big feature request would be some form of fuzzy logic to watch which articles I actually click through to, and then adjust rankings of new articles appropriately.
Adam