BadMagicNumber

My quest to make Google Reader work the way I want it to continues.

One of the biggest complaints people have with Google Reader is that there is no way to mark all items as read. Having unread items make people feel under pressure, which I (I believe) is one of the things that river-of-news style aggregators are supposed to avoid. Unfortunately, not feeling the pressure of unread items in Google Reader at the moment is something of a Zen meditation exercise.

This Greasemonkey script solves that. To use it, go to the “Edit Subscription” page, then in the “More Actions” box you'll find a “Mark all as read” action. The first time you use it you may need to run it a couple of times to completely clear out your reading list (there doesn't seem to be a good way of finding out if the reading list display is empty or not).

Tested with Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Greasemonkey 0.6.4.

Download the script here.

My Google Reader Module is now available in the IG directory and approved as an inline module. This means you no longer need the developer module to use it.

Thank's to Mihai & Adam from Google for their help with this.

Here's a few screenshots of my take on personalized meme-tracking:

My Memes:
Nik Cubrilovic:
Robert Scoble:
US Politics (Just to prove it isn't just a tech-blogger thing):

Somewhat surprisingly, this is an actual quote from real Java job advertisment from a serious recruitement company:

This project has massive potential. It could be bigger than SMS.

I don't know what to make of it.. does it mean that it pays more than it costs to send an SMS? Or perhaps you will be required to write code using a phone keypad?

I was kind of disappointed to see that I couldn't buy stock in the company – I'm sure (to quote another recent email that ended up in my spam box for some strange reason):

It is only a matter of time before it is released out into the investment
community and they take it to the moon..

What is http://beta.bloglines.com?

So back in October, I began working on another little side project
involving personalized meme-tracking.

Basically, my software can take an OPML file and generate a clustered display similar to memeorandum. Over the last couple
of days a few other people have mentioned similar ideas – in particular Robert Scoble mentioned
Megite, and Dare Obasanjo asked to “able to provide it the OPML for blogs.msdn.com and have it show me what the hot topics were among Microsoft bloggers”.

So here's a screenshot, using http://blogs.msdn.com/Opml.aspx as a source:

It's not available to the public yet – I haven't had time to work on a few scalability issues yet.
If you'd like to discuss this, though, email works: nlothian at apache dot org.

My original Google IG/ Google Reader
module has proved quite popular. I have now updated it so it displays entries separately outside the module. I find this a lot easier to use than the old version.

Those of you with the old version installed will be upgraded automatically. Otherwise, the installation instructions are:

Update: Now availble via the Google Directory and approved for inline use. Just go to http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=reader and add it.

Update (7 April 2006): Some recent changes to the Reader API broke my IG module. All is fixed now, so if you have been having problems give it another go.

ROME 0.8 is out, with Atom 1.0 support.

We had a lot of help with this release from a whole set of new contributors, which is great. It is excellent to see the number of people who use ROME and are prepared to help out when required. P@ has more details.