Friday, October 5, 2007

Burned *again* by Google Reader

I really like Google Reader. But one "feature" keeps biting me in the ass:


When viewing 500+ unread items, I'd say the "Mark all as read" button (Destroyer of Worlds) is just a wee bit too close to the frequently poked "Refresh" button. The first time I got burned by this I wrote a nice email to the Google Reader team, but I guess they still think it's a good idea. I guess it's not a big deal that I have no way of finding out what those 500+ items were that I had yet to read/skim/star/share/skip. Yesterday I took matters into my own hands:


Thank you Greasemonkey. You can find my little script at userscripts.org. It is based on this other script by Scott Cowan. I never thought I'd use Greasemonkey, but Google Reader is just far too dangerous in its unaltered state!

I will say, though, that the addition of search in Google Reader helps to alleviate the loss of all those unread items. It was a long time coming, but it works great. :-)

5 comments:

jmj said...

If you don't click the 'refresh' button and just type the 'r' key, you won't have this problem either :) That's what I do.

Anonymous said...

Or the keyboard shortcut for mark-all-as-read ('A').

Sandy said...

@jsled: Yeah, fortunately uppercase 'A' is not something I ever accidentally hit while using Google Reader. ;-)

I could update the script to remove that shortcut key if there's an interest.

@jonner: I do use 'r' sometimes, but for whatever reason I tend to mouse on that button more than anything else. Not sure why...

Anonymous said...

I'm surprised Google Reader doesn't have an "Undo" function like Gmail has when you perform similar actions.

barryhunter said...

Thanks for this. Just what I need. (got here after looking for that Undo button after been burned myself :(