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.