If you use Google Reader, this is genius.
Thanks to Sandra at Diary of a Stay at Home Mom, I have discovered the Next button feature. In Google Reader, click on Settings, then on Goodies; from there, drag the Next button into your browser toolbar. If you are not sure how to do it, Sandra gives a video tutorial.
Once you have the Next button in your toolbar, you can use it to move chronologically from one new post in your Reader to the next. You then get the benefit of being taken directly to the link - no need to click through to leave comments or to see full posts, and you can see all those pretty templates. If you have your subscriptions organised in separate folders, you can add separate, tagged buttons - homeschooling blogs, knitting blogs, or whatever.
As I said ... sheer genius!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Next, Please!
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10 comments:
Isn't it genius? I'm so glad I found it, I can't believe I went that long without it, it's so much easier and I LOVE browsing the actual blogs :)
Now that is clever. Thanks for sharing the tip.
Interesting.
I'm playing around with it now. Still trying to figure out the order it moves in. It seems somewhat random. If it is chronological it must go from the most recent post to older posts; but it seems a bit more mixed up than that. It doesn't seem completely chronological. And it's brought up one or two blog posts I thought I'd already read via Reader.
I'm not sure it will replace my usual Google reader methodology as I tend to read blogs in the order of who I want to visit with at a particular day. I suppose you could control that by being more regimented in organizing blog posts into groups like you suggest.
But it is a fun way to mix things up. I've definitely hit some posts that I wouldn't have gotten to till much later that I was glad to read when I met them. It's got a spontaneity to it that I do like. And it does make it easier to comment etc. I do like seeing the actual webpages. I'm going to keep playing.
Did you see what happens when you click Next and there are no more unread items? It links you to this:
The End of the Internet
Congratulations! This is the last page. Thank you for visiting the End of the Internet. There are no more links.
You must now turn off your computer and go do something productive.
Go read a book, for pete's sake.
Too funny!
That is very cool, except it makes it a lot harder to share things in the sidebar widget. :(
Charlotte - too funny about the endnote. I love it!
L2L,
Do you mean that shared items don't come through? I thought they did.
Melanie,
Mine seems to be in the same order it was in on my reader.
Charlotte,
I think mine might seem all out of order because of the odd way I tend to skip around and leave some things in my reader marked unread to read until later. I also have some unread stuff that is weeks or months old from blogs that I don't get around to very often but I want to remember to see what they've said. I currently have about 170 unread items, some of them quite old.
I think L2Lmom means that it is harder to add things to a Google powered shared items box like the one I have on my blog sidebar. When I'm reading blog posts in Google reader all I have to do to share them is click on a "share" button at the bottom of the reader. But if I'm on the web page that button is obviously not there.
However, Alicia, there is another gadget you can add to your browser's toolbar that lets you share any page in the widget. Just click on "Your stuff" and drag the "Note in Reader" link to your toolbar. Then you can share any page on the web not just those you're following in Google Reader.
Melanie, they seemed to be in chronological order to me, with the newest first. I would prefer oldest first, but I can live with reading backwards. I'm used to reading things in chronological order ... I often read blogs on my iPod Touch and that is how the mobile Google Reader works. I can choose to read by individual blogs, but I find that more fiddly.
I enjoy the surprise element of not knowing what will come up next, and love being taken directly to the blogs. Having to click through if I wanted to see the original or leave a comment was the one thing about Google Reader that I found irritating. I don't subscribe to that many blogs, and tend to keep up fairly well with the ones I read, so the complete randomness isn't a problem.
Charlotte - the end of the internet message fun had me chuckling when I found it :).
Coolness about the extra gadget. I'll definitely check it out!!! Thanks all. :)
It may be genius, but I didn't understand a word of it!
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