Screencast of Google Reader

January 31, 2008 · Comments

Google Reader is my often-touted RSS reader of choice. I’ve really not put the reason for that into words very well, so here, instead, is a screencast with voiceover. It’s a full screen experience.

**UPDATE: I ran out of bandwidth where it was, so I put a copy on Blip.tv (a great video host), and if you want to download the native file (better quality), it’s here.

That’s how we roll at [chrisbrogan.com]

If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to have future articles delivered to your feed reader.

Tagged as: , , , ,

ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Thesis Theme for WordPress

Thesis WordPress theme

Thesis is the search engine optimized WordPress theme of choice for serious online publishers. If you’re a blogger who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality without having to alter any code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.

With so many design options, you can use the template over and over and never have it look like the same site. The theme is robust and flexible enough not only to accommodate a site like ChrisBrogan.com, but also to enable the site to run far more efficiently than it ever has before.

  • I have used and enjoyed google reader for some time, but didn't know about keyboard shortcuts, worth just to learn that. Also that was a really high quality screen cast, high res, high bitrate, screencast.com looks like a cool and reasonable pricing place to host screencasts.
  • Great screencast, Chris--really well done. Did you do that in one take? You flipped back b/w Google Reader and Twitter so fast, it looked like an edit.

    And you're right: a screencast was the medium to deliver this in. Lights-camera-action speaks louder than words (alone.)
  • Very cool - learned a couple of tips for optimizing Google Reader - plus the screencast was terrific.
  • Chris, loved the screencast. You had a couple of good tips I'll implement immediately as well as turning me on to Better Google Reader.

    Thanks!!
  • Edward Kustoff
    Great screencast. I definitely picked up a few tips. Thanks!
  • Just thinking out loud a little bit about keyboard shortcuts. Most desktop apps make use of keyboard shortcuts, but few web apps do, maybe it's time for more web apps to use keyboard shortcuts
  • I just switched to Google Reader and I'm in love (again). Haven't gotten into sharing articles yet. It's enough to keep up on my own at the moment. BTW: couldn't' get your link to work.
  • Great screencast. My only suggestion would be to maybe go into the keyboard shortcuts a bit more - explain the basic ones: j/k to move up and down (and open each item to read it), n/p to move the "highlight" without opening the post (which you did touch on), and perhaps best, l to pull up the label selector so you can jump between labels, and ? to pull up an explanation window of all these.
  • Excelent! Thanks.
    Btw, I found that pressing j opens the next one and closes the previous.
    Do you have a way to mark things for future reading list (when you have more time)?
    Keren
  • Chris, Thanks for putting this screencast together. I'm just switching to Google Reader and I like it well enough except in two areas -- 1. a lot of sites don't have links to Google reader so I have to manually enter them. 2. when it does allow me to add Google reader, I always get taken to the login screen even when I'm already logged in. These two things might be dealbreakers for me...I'll give it another week, though.
  • Pamela:
    You don't need to rely on a site having "subscribe in Google Reader" buttons. In Firefox, RSS feeds are detected and if you click the orange RSS icon in the address bar it will prompt you which service you'd like to subscribe in. You can set Google Reader to be the default. IE7 has similar functionality, I believe, as do all major browsers (Safari, Opera).

    As for the login issues, are you logged in with "Remember me" checked? You might try logging out, clearing your cookies, and logging in again with that checked, just in case.
  • gRegor, thanks for your thoughts. these issues occur when I'm already logged into the Reader. And, yeah, I have "remember me" selected. When I want to subscribe if there is no Google link, then it goes into my regular IE7 RSS. If there is a Google link then it takes me to the Google login page. I'm not aware of an IE7 RSS setting for defaulting to Google, but I do have the Google toolbar which seems to be controlling the process. Regardless, the process is not working, leading me to the conclusion that it's just as easy to have my feeds in IE where I can always seem them anyway. But I'm willing to keep going with Google, if for no other reason than to figure it out.
  • I now see Google Reader in a whole new way. Thanks! What did you use to create your screencast? Very smooth!
  • I did a little digging around. There is a known issue with IE7 and Google Reader. The workaround for IE7 is documented here:

    http://internetducttape.com/2007/08/06/google-r...

    However, the bottom line is that even with the fix it takes 3 clicks to add a feed. That's 2 too many. So, it seems like the solution is either to abandon Google Reader and add feeds in IE7, or to abandon IE7 and move to Firefox.
  • I've been using google reader for some time now. I don't share stuff because I basically just read other people's posts. I do post comments on their blogs. If they like my blog they subscribe to it.

    Thanks, Chris, for this post to give tips and such for people who use it in all its capabilities.
  • Thanks Chris...I've been a Google Reader user for a *long* time but after watching the screencast I feel like I've been in the stone-age with my RSS reading!

    I am just flying through my content now!
  • great screencast. I just started putting everything into folders myself actually. It's been great.
  • Great information. I\'m book marking this site.
  • First of all congratulation for such a great site. I learned a lot reading article here today. I will make sure i visit this site once a day so i can laern more.
blog comments powered by Disqus

Previous post:

Next post: