UPDATE: I somehow managed to break the below-mentioned Greasemonkey script before uploading it to userscripts.org. If you tried it out and nothing happened, the fault is mine. It is all fixed now.
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Remember how I was trying to get Google Reader to listen to my usability complaint re: links to articles being only at the top?

Well, this problem has not yet been addressed by the Google team…  but it has been addressed by me.

I greased up the monkey and with one fell swoop made Google Reader’s interface one gripe cleaner.  My new Greasemonkey script copies the title/URL from the top of every item and includes it at the bottom as well.

You can install it here.

If, on the other hand, you’re mystified by this whole Greasemonkey thing, I’ll give a brief explanation.  Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that lets users create scripts that will affect the content of web pages before they’re displayed in the browser.  There are thousands of pre-made scripts to be found at userscripts.org, affecting all sorts of popular sites, and you can always badger your favorite nerds into making custom ones.  Some of my favorite pre-made scripts are:

1) AutoPagerize, which causes page 2 (then 3 etc) to automatically be inserted at the end of page one for many popular site.  Tired of ‘next’ing your way through your Google search results or Twitter timeline?  This handy script just requires you to scroll and the next bunch magically appear.

2) YousableTubeFix, this does a bunch of handy things to YouTube pages, the most handy of which is defaulting the the “HD” videos, and increasing the size of the player dramatically.  YouTube has never been so pleasant.

That ought to be enough to get you started, but with Greasemonkey, pretty much anything you’ve ever dreamed you could do with a website is possible.

Defined tags for this entry: firefox, geeky, google, google reader, greasemonkey, programming

Hey Google,

It’s me again.  Since our last conversation, I’ve realized something else you could do to make our time together in Reader more productive and less angrifying.  Know how I share lots of stuff in my “Shared Items,” despite only like 4 people seeing them?  Well, it’d be really helpful if I didn’t have to be subscribed to my own Shared Items.  I mean, I shared them.  I don’t need you showing them to me again. (Despite that one time that I accidentally saw something cool in there that I forgot had gotten there because of me, and went ahead and shared it again.  Sharing an item from my shared items… that’s classy.)  At the very least, could you make sure they actually get marked as read after I read them?  I perpetually have 11-or-so “new” items in there that I’ve seen a hundred times.

Seriously, Google.  I’m beginning to think this conversation is one-sided.  Don’t make me start writing to SkyNet instead.

Defined tags for this entry: feedback, freedback, google, google reader, open letters, rants

Hey, Google? 

I know we’re not the bestest of friends, but you may have noticed that we spend a rather large amount of time together.  I’ve been thinking: I’d like for you to do something for me to make that time just a little bit more pleasant.

You know how I use your Reader to read all the blogs and stuff to which I subscribe?  (Of course you do.  You know EVERYTHING about me.)  Anyway, I frequently find that, after reading an article in Google Reader, I’d like to go leave a comment on the originating site.  This then involves scrolling back up in reader to get to the TOP of the post—which is the only place you include a link to the originating item’s URL.  Could you go ahead and add a link at the bottom of each entry as well, so I don’t have to keep scrolling back up, oftimes quite a distance?

You may have noticed that your FeedBurner service frequently includes “comment” links in the bottoms of people’s posts, and that most feeds include “comment-url” fields that you could use to generate “comment on this” links rather easily.  It would be even more spectacular if, when you have such data, you could go ahead and generate such a link for me and put it in the footer of each item.  In the absence of this data, a simple link to the originating URL would suffice nicely. Either way, a link at the bottom of the post would be at least as—if not more—valuable as the one at the top.

Aside from making me happier, this could also help provide you with another metric of usage by your users.  You’ll know which posts they commented on, and can provide them a list so they can check up on them later.  It seems to me that knowing the level of interactivity users have with specific sites would be a rather valuable addition to the amount of data you amass on each of your users, allowing you to target advertisements just that much more accurately.

This simple addition could go a long ways towards making my—and undoubtedly countless others’s’s—time with you just that much more pleasant.  Not to mention that it would make each and every one of us just that much more valuable to you as a statistic.

Hopefully yours,
Oh heck—like you don’t already know who I am.

Defined tags for this entry: freedback, freedbacking, geeky, google reader, improvement ideas, open letters, pleasing users