If you subscribe to all the blogs you found interesting at some point, you end up with a huge list of subscriptions. A possible solution is to reduce the number of items from your reading list using filters like: don't show me the posts from Google Operating System that include "YouTube" in the title. While Google Reader doesn't support filters yet, there are some tools that might help.
Google Reader Filter is a Greasemonkey script that lets you define a list of keywords you're interested in and a list of uninteresting keywords. The script highlights the posts that include your favorite keywords in the title and grays out the posts that contain keywords from the blacklist. You can use regular expressions for defining complex restrictions, like dates or long titles.
The script doesn't remove posts, so it's more like an automatic highlighter. Feed Rinse has another approach: add a feed, define a list of simple rules for filtering and you get a filtered feed that can be added to your feed reader. For some reason, I couldn't subscribe to Feed Rinse's feeds in Google Reader, even though they were valid and any other feed reader accepted them. Hopefully, it's just a temporary problem.
You could also use a Yahoo Pipe that lets you define a list of keywords that are potentially interesting. So if you enter gmail, google calendar as a filter, the pipe will obtain a list of posts that contain Gmail or Google Calendar. After running the pipe, click on "More options", select "Get as RSS" and subscribe to the feed. As Yahoo doesn't allow you to change the feed's title, you should rename it in Google Reader.
Labels: Google Reader, Greasemonkey, Yahoo Pipes
said on March 8, 2008 7:28 PM PDT:
Or you can also filter your RSS feeds manually:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/6_ways_to_filter_your_rss_feeds.php
personally, I prefer that, as I cannot enjoy the benifits of greasemonkey while I keep changing computers.
said on March 8, 2008 8:55 PM PDT:
If you create your own yahoo pipe, you can name it anything you want...
louisgray said on March 9, 2008 12:24 AM PDT:
The question is... why are 3rd party developers more likely to come up with new Google Reader innovations than the Reader team, when it's so obvious it should be done?
said on March 9, 2008 12:38 AM PDT:
Almost all of my rss feeds are grouped and filtered through yahoo pipes. It makes life so much easier. Especially in my low-importance news feeds. Anything that allows me to filter out any news about Britney and Lohan is good with me ;)
@Louis Gray:
* The number of "third-parties" is much bigger than the number of members in the
Google Reader team.
* "Third-parties" don't have to integrate a feature or make it scale.
I updated the pipe to support negative restrictions and filtering for the author's name.
Bruno said on March 9, 2008 6:41 AM PDT:
Another great tool for feed readers is
Feed43 (Feed for free), which lets you turn any web page into an RSS feed. The feed creation may be somewhat confusing for a novice, but if you know your way around HTML it's great for those web sites that have a 'news' page but don't provide a feed.
(I'm not associated with Feed43, just a happy user!)
I just started using Feed Rinse and I can confirm that it works fine with Google Reader.
@Matt:
I can't add any feed from Feed Rinse. Google Reader shows this message: "No feed available for http://feedrinse.com/services/...".
How to customize (links color, background) this kind of page:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/12863411747128416240/state/com.google/starred
I found css file, but how to edit it?
Mark said on March 13, 2008 6:08 PM PDT:
Feed Rinse works fine with my Google Reader account. I've been using it for a couple of months now to filter out all the Paris Hilton and Britney Spears stories out of my Google Reader. Works like a charm!
sol said on March 19, 2008 12:30 PM PDT:
Is there anyway one can prevent, say, posts with embedded videos from either being delivered or (preferably) being delivered with the videos excised? I tried to do so in Yahoo! Pipes a few months back, but couldn't figure out how to use non-textual content-based mechanisms.
