Google Reader rocks… sort of.

It’s been almost six months since I dropped Omea Reader as my primary RSS/ATOM reader for the ajaxy Google Reader. I loved Omea, but it’s just to difficult to run on a stick and I couldn’t access my feeds from other machines. I dropped it and uploaded my OPML (all 70 feeds) to Google Reader.

At the time, Reader only presented the feeds that came in after the OPML upload (which was nice). I believe that they now present a considerable amount of past posts as well – on 70 feeds, that could be a whole lotta posts.

All was well with the migration until I left town for 2 weeks and didn’t login to my Reader account – even once.

There was absolutely no way of knowing just how many posts I actually had that were unread. I anticipated that it was in the thousands.

I don’t know if you suffer from this same neurosis, but I feel unsettled when I leave applications in an unresolved state. I am a devoted follower of Zero Email Bounce principles (although I have 3 unreads in my inbox right now… I’m torn… do I finish this post, or classify them?) and like applications to close with a clean state. My wife would argue however that this need for resolution gets left at work – weird huh?

Now the real problem… Reader has NO way to mark all as read. How am I suppose to rest when 1) I don’t know how many unread messages are left or 2) I have no way of just purging them and moving on?

What a disastrous productivity sanity killer for me. I could have been doing so many other things besides that infuriating [j] wait [j] wait [j] wait [j] wait sequence on my keyboard - all without knowing when (or even if) the end would come. Shoot me please!

It psychosis was so advanced that that, a couple of weeks ago, I switched all of my feeds over to Rojo. Rojo is a wonderful reader implementation and I love the interface (esp. the mark page and mark all as read buttons). However, I was always a little uneasy that maybe all of my feeds weren’t being regularly updated. I’m probably just paranoid.

I still hadn’t given up on Rojo, but really needed my Reader fix. Enter Greasemonkey and the Google Reader Auto-Read script:

A good (but slooow) way of marking all items as read. Add’s a new link next to the “Starred” link to toggle Auto-Read on or off. Marks current item read (and moves to the next) every half-second.

Might want to run this in a background tab or when you go to sleep.

Change the “speed” variable to make it faster if you want.

Great for those testing out new aggregators who don’t want to have to constantly mark everything as read.

I can now read through Reader until I feel that the posts are getting a little old, click Start Auto-Read and open a new tab to continue on with other things. The default speed for the script was a 1500 ms between messages, but I bumped that up to 500 ms between and didn’t see any problems. I did tried 100 ms, but it skipped over most of the entries without marking them as read. Peace.

BTW – when the auto read finally finished earlier today, I had amassed a total of 3476 unread posts (not counting the ones that I had taken care of with my [j] wait sequence) since getting behind about a month ago. The weight is gone. I have closure. I have resolution. All is right again.

[Side note: I was lead to the Google Reader Auto-Read script by Jason Clark while actually trying to resurrect my Reader account with [j] wait. Thanks man, you’re better than prozac – not that I would know.]