Google Reader, Meet the Mac OS X Look & Feel

/ Adam Nash

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.

2 thoughts on “Google Reader, Meet the Mac OS X Look & Feel”

  2. 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

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