The Google Reader for Personalized Home Page gets a few updates yesterday in reaction to the users’ suggestions, Mihai Parparita posts at the Official Google Reader Blog. A “mark all as read” link so you can more easily catch up
Unread counts for your reading list and tags
Better support for themes
The ability to sort items oldest-first I am still a big fan of the full interface Google Reader.

Google is now reporting how many of its users are subscribed to website’s feeds, by including the subscriber info in the header its Feedfetcher spider leaves when it grabs a feed. This means that if you look at the header, you’ll know how many users combined subscribe to that feed in Google Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage

The Google Reader team added a little convenience for Blogger users: If you’re using the new Blogger system (and practically everybody is now), you can add a Google Reader widget to your blog sidebar just by clicking an “Add to Blogger” button. Reader is taking advantage of Blogger’s new architecture to streamline the process for users, making it completely unnecessary for less experienced users to have to edit code.
Oh, what does the widget do? If you are sharing feed items, like some bloggers do, making a nice little link blog, you can use it to display the latest headlines to your blog readers

Hitwise has released a graph tracking major web-based RSS readers (Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo, Newsgator and Netvibes) over the last year, and their stats show that Google Reader leapt out of a malaise after the release of the new version, and while it has a ways to go before catching Bloglines, it is finally a contender.
On January 6 of this year, Reader had .00011 of all U.S

Google Reader added a really cool feature, Google Reader Trends, that shows you your personal reading statistics for your Reader account. You get charts and statistics on the feeds you read the most, the stuff you star and share the most, the total number of read items charted by day, time of day, or day of the week, the feeds that update the most frequently, and the ones that have not updated in the longest time.
I don’t use Reader, but I have loaded my OPML in there, and it tells me that the MSDN blog feed is my most active, with an average of 103 items a day

Using a combination of great ideas, you can put a search feature (that is sorely lacking) right into Google Reader. First, follow these instructions to export an OPML of your Reader subscriptions, then create a custom search engine based on that OPML file (which you can upload directly into the CSE)

Google Reader users should enjoy a few new options for feed management. You can now rename feeds (especially useful with sites that overload their RSS feed name with fifteen words), and easily add them to a folder from a drop-down. Previously, you had to head into a settings page for feed management, which was just plain annoying.

I switched from Bloglines to Google Reader a few weeks ago, and my life has forever changed for the better. Here’s the list of tips and tricks from what I’ve discovered so far.

This freeware app (Mac only) connects to your Google reader account and alerts you of new, unread items. This is not an official Google app, but it looks, feels and works just like Google notifier for Mac. Download now. Via Lifehacker.

The Gmail power users out there probably know about Mihai Parparita’s greasemonkey scripts to enhance Gmails functionality such as multiple signatures and integrating Google reader with Gmail.

If you liked those, you’ll probably like the updates with added funcionality.

I complained almost a month ago that Google Reader should allow me to drag and drop my feeds in the left pane to rearrange them and move them among categories/folders. Google has done something about it.

There is now an option to move a feed to a folder right after you add it. This not quite as good as what I wanted, but it’s better than nothing. Now all they need to do is add this functionality to all feeds, not just a new feed right after you add it. If I’m looking at a feed and reading it, that’s the perfect time to make a judgment call as to what folder(s) it should go in. Why can’t I have a tiny drop-down box at the top to add the current feed to a different folder and optionally remove it from current folders?

The Google reader team rolled this feature out over a week ago and I finally caught on- Thanks Google.

Google employee and blogger Mihai Parprita has created a greasemonkey script that runs in Firefox and will integrate Google Reader with Gmail. You can download it and give it a try.

If you want it spelled out:

• Install Greasemonkey
• Install the integration sript
• Restart Firefox
• Reload/Open Gmail

Did I go way overboard on the links in this post or what?

According to the official Google reader blog, Google has just released a few more upgrades to the Google reader interface. This comes one week after their big improvements to their reader. Here’s a quick summary of the new features:

• You can pick your start page - In preferences, you can choose what page to show by default when you log into google reader. It can be the All feeds page, the homepage, or any category.
• You can hide the left navigation pane - If you’re tired of seeing a list of hundreds of feeds there, and you want to maximise your reading real estate, just hit “u” to toggle between showing and hiding the pane.
• Feed refreshing - Google reader now automatically refreshes itself to keep you up-to-the-minute. If you’re even to impatient for that, they’ve included a small “refresh” link as well.
• Spacebar - Use the spacebar to go from item to item.

So there you have it. Google keeps listening to users’ input and continues to improve the product. Now all I’m waiting for is drag-and-drop rearrangement for feeds/categories so I don’t have to go to the “Manage Categories” page, which I think is not the most intuitive page.

So you like the snazzy new Google reader interface? I think it’s also pretty cool that when you’ve run out of new items to read Reader displays this.

Which leads you to this famous page.