I was reading my feeds earlier, using Firefox and thought about increasing the font size, so in the menu bar, View-> Text Size, a couple times, and my eyes were happier. The next menu option below Text Size is Page Style, and it had two options, Basic Page Style, and No Style. Choosing no style instantly gave me a rather long River of News style of reading my feeds.
So anyways on to the thought I had while doing this, Google Maps has mashups.
Why not a Google Reader Mashup? I’m no HTML guru but I think all you would really need to change is the first CSS file it calls for in the source using Greasemonkey. Maybe something simple and put the sidebar on the other side? Or change and add more keyboard shortcuts? A search box?
Say pressing control + ? brings up the keyboard shortcuts on the FAQ. using some DHTML goodness or whatever they’re using these days and have it be overlayed on the webpage, like they have on Netflix for when you have the cursor over a movie title.
I was reading something, and later thought about it more and wanted to read it again, but forgot to star it.
I would go and read all the posts, scanning through possibly hundreds of items, but why would I do that. Oh yea I have to.
It honestly feels weird having a page on Google which does not include a Search box. Almost every other page I’ve seen on Google has one. Ideally I wouldn’t mind having the option to perform a Google search on information only posted from my feeds. This would obviously include more logic.
I’m sure there are other things that would be cool to modify the reader to do we just need to think of them.
Maybe Google will soon open up Reader like Maps, and let people do fun things with feed reading.
[tags]freedbacking, google_reader, aggregators, mashups, ideas, searching_feeds, searching, help, keyboard_shortcuts[/tags]
