Although I’ve tried several feed readers, Google Reader is the only one I’ve used for more than a year. Not everyone will agree with my choice, but its simple and straightforward interface was probably the reason why I stayed with it for this long. But, despite its simplicity, there are many ways for the average reader to customize their Google Reader experience. Here are some examples:

Change Google Reader to Suit Your Aesthetics

Though there aren’t many visual settings you can change within Google Reader itself, there are many available skins and Firefox add-ons that can do this for you.

One of them is Better Greader by Gina Trapani. It allows you to view pages inline, which isn’t practical for netbooks but looks great on bigger monitors. It also comes with a few minimalist skins, including the stunning Helvetireader. If you’re familiar with CSS, you can take it a step further and modify Helvetireader yourself. For those who want a darker look, check out Google Redesigned. It adds a sleek dark skin to Google Calendar, Reader and Gmail.

Use Trends to Streamline Your Subscription List

Around once a month, I check out the “Trends” section of Google Reader. It’s an easy way to check the feeds that I don’t read often. I unsubscribe any feed with a reading rate below 50 percent, because this means that most of the time I don’t get much value out of that subscription.

Under the “Subscription Trends” section, you can also display the most inactive feeds, as well as the most frequently updated ones. This allows you to delete feeds from defunct blogs, or from blogs that update more often than you like.

Streamlining your subscriptions with data from Google Reader Trends can tell you a lot about your feed reading habits. This means that you’ll be evaluating subscriptions based on facts rather than the hope of “I’m sure someday I’ll get some interest/value out of this feed.”

Process Your Reading List Faster by Starring

Google Reader has a “Starred Items” feature that allows you to attach a star to important items. Instead of using this feature to have a lengthy archive of previously-read posts, you can use this it to speed up your processing time within Google Reader. Here’s how I do it:

1. I view my new reading items under “All Items,” under “Show” I select “List” by default.
2. Looking at all the listed titles, I star every item that I want to read in full. Then, I click “Mark all as read.”
3. I go to the “Starred Items” section and read each item one by one, un-starring them as I go along.

With this practice I can often finish reading my entire list in one short sitting, or I can go back and read them later when I have free time. And when I go back, I don’t have to sift through other unread items that I already processed earlier in the day.

Add the “Subscribe as You Surf” Bookmarklet.

When I use the default RSS button on Firefox to subscribe, it takes me to a page where I have to choose my feed reader, then when I choose “Google” I have to select Google Reader. To avoid these multiple steps, I use a bookmarklet to make the subscription process easier. Go to Settings > Goodies, and under “Subscribe as you surf” drag the “Subscribe…” link onto your Bookmarks toolbar.

Share Items Directly from Your Reading List

As Charlie noted earlier this year, by going to Settings > Send To, you can enable Google Reader to share selected feed items to Digg, Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, and other social media sites. After doing this you’ll be able to see a “Send To” menu at the bottom of each post (see image below). This automates sharing as much as possible, although you’ll have to log in to your social media accounts if you haven’t done so already.

Know Your Keyboard Shortcuts

In my experience, navigating Google Reader tends to be faster with keyboard shortcuts. At the very least, minimizing mouse movements in general prevents your hand from getting too strained. Print out this handy keyboard shortcut list and keep it near your desk until you’ve memorized them by heart.

Do you use Google Reader? How do you customize it to suit your needs and habits?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

While RSS feeds give us the latest news, blog posts, and site updates through a single interface, it’s not farfetched to think that they can also be a major time suck.  If you notice that this is happening, that you’re spending more time on your feed reader than you want to, then perhaps it’s time to quit your feed reader altogether.

Or you know, you can just fine-tune your subscription list

Do a review. Whether it’s every month or every quarter, you should review your feed subscriptions regularly.  Without a review, it’s easy to overlook “dead” blogs and sites that are no longer relevant to you.  If you don’t review your subscriptions once in a while, the best time to start is now.  Don’t worry, you don’t have to put it in your calendar or anything – just do it when you feel like it’s time.

What value does each feed give? When doing your review, it’s important to evaluate what makes each feed valuable.  Does it give you a daily dose of how to further your career?  Were you given ideas that allowed you to lessen your home expenses?  Does it make you laugh?

Also consider how frequent you get something valuable from a subscription.  Is every update valuable?  Is it valuable at least once a week?  Is it valuable every few months?  For some subscriptions, you might be saying to yourself “Well, it hasn’t been valuable yet…but it might be later on.”

For cases like these, I refer to an ancient Sumerian saying goes “Get it only when you need it.” Okay, maybe I made that one up, but it’s a rule that applies to kitchenware, packing, and yes, even RSS feeds.  If your reason for buying fondue forks is “You’ll never know when we’ll have a fondue party”, then odds are these forks will gather dust for several months until you need to use them – if ever that actually happens.

The same goes for RSS feeds.  “You’ll never know when they’ll post something I can use…” is a very flimsy reason for subscribing to something – and I know this from experience.  If there’s particular information you need, then that’s the time you go out and look for it, rather than hoarding useless feeds in the hopes that something useful might come up.

Remove blogs that seem to parrot each other. I used to subscribe to over 10 interior design and architecture blogs – until I realized that they just crossed-link to each other and posted the same pictures anyway.  Remember that in these cases, the Unsubscribe button is your friend.

For blogs with frequent updates within the day, subscribe to the weekly or monthly feed instead.  There are many blogs which post several times each day.  Included in that group is one of my all-time favorites, Lifehacker.  Listen, I love Lifehacker.  I believe it’s an invaluable resource to me. But if I subscribed to their regular feed, which has 8 to 12 new items on most days, that’s a lot of time taken away from my work, especially if I love a post and feel the need to file it somewhere.

The good news is that they offer a variety of feed options.  They offer a feed for top stories only, a monthly feed (which I subscribe to), and several tag-specific feeds as well.  If some of your favorite blogs have these options, take advantage of them.

I wish some of my other favorite blogs would have tag-specific feeds as well.  While there are many bloggers whose work I love reading regularly, I really don’t want to know what’s going on in their love life and what they had for dinner.  Other blogs, especially those which offer real-time news, should also consider these multiple feed options if they don’t want readers to get turned off by the massive amount of content they publish, no matter how great the content is.

I know that having a feed reader has made my online reading life much simpler, since I can go through my favorite blogs in one go.  But without the occasional review, I know I’ll be committing an extra couple of hours each day just going through new items that don’t give me anything back for the 10 minutes I spent reading them.

How many feed subscriptions do you have?  Do you review them once in a while to delete the ones you don’t really need or want?

Image by Svilen Mushkatov from Sxc.hu

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Once installed, the Snackr user interface is nothing more than a plus sign where you add feeds; an icon for options including manually adding and removing feeds and changing feed preferences such as the ticker speed and placement; an icon to expand or collapse your ticker, and an X to quit the app. Tiny, compact, virtually unobtrusive.

The great thing about this tool is that I am getting my RSS feeds in a way that feels much more consumable to me. I can dive in at any time and read up on the latest articles and posts to keep me on top of my game as a Web worker.

The ticker, however, while placed “out of the way” is not so unobtrusive.

No matter where I place the Snackr ticker and no matter how slowly I set it, the darn thing just keeps going and going and going and going. For me, it becomes distracting as my eyes jump to the moving titles and images.

Maybe over time, I’ll get used to it. But I find myself collapsing it after a minute because it is subliminally sending my brain into a frenzy. The ticker is probably much less pushy on a larger monitor. On my MacBook, the ticker is hugging the bottom of my browser window so it is hard to not notice.

Also, I’d really like a Pause button so I can have a dozen article and post titles across the bottom of my screen for a while that I can pick through at my leisure instead of feeling like I’m missing something.

Set up is easy (thank goodness).

Go to your feed reader and look for an export feature to make an OPML file. I use Google Reader so I clicked on “Settings,” then “Import/Export,” and finally “Export your subscriptions as an OPML file.” The file was created very quickly.

Then Click on the tiny Options icon, click Import, and voila!

So how does Snackr compare to Newsfire, the OS X little feed reader app that Mike Gunderloy wrote about in March? Well, when I went to test out Newsfire, I couldn’t figure out how to import the OPML file that I had exported from Google Reader. Whatever Google Reader spit out was not compatible with Newsfire, so I couldn’t do a comparison.

I like my apps to work with minimal struggle on my part so despite the lack of a pause button on Snackr, I am actually enjoying it in little, tiny bites.

(P.S. Just got a tweet from the Snackr folks: “Planning to add some less-distracting animation options, like fading in new items instead of the continuous scroll.”)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Why iPad 2 Will Lead Consumers Into the Post-PC Era
• The Near-Term Evolution of Social Commerce
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks