2006-01-09

Jasper's Google Reader subscribe user script

I was using Johan's Google Reader Subscribe user script (see the post on his blog) for some time now. I just loved it. The only downside was that it draw a lot of attention and it slowed scrolling down on my laptop. If you've got the same problem you might like Jasper's Google Reader subscribe user script for Greasemonkey. It was designed to use as little screen size as possible. It only adds a feed icon in the top right corner. When you mouse over the feed icon the subscribe links are shown.

I could copy Johan's code but I chose to rewrote the code to experiment with XPath queries. Man, they are powerful!

0.2

Implemented improvement suggested by Chris Wetherell.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks great, works great! Thanks! Creds to johan though, used his script before this one.

Anonymous said...

I agree; XPath is a lot nicer than DOM twiddling. Regarding this script, you might want to check out the LiveLines extension, to put the functionality in the Firefox feed icon instead of in the page content area.

Anonymous said...

Great! I'll check the extension.. that would be even better then this script.

Anonymous said...

You can now also use the Google Toolbar to subscribe to feeds.

Chris Wetherell said...

This is a great script, Jasper! (I'm a Google engineer.) We made some recent changes in the Reader URLs, if you have time a small change in your script would improve things a bit, especially for various kinds of blog search feeds.

The suggestion: if you change the string comprising the preview link to 'a href="http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/'+ encodeURIComponent(feeds[i].href) +'"' then a redirect won't be incurred and querystrings in the feed URL will also be passed.

(Comment copied from userscripts.org)

Also, just wanted to mention that, unfortunately, we can't currently use the Google Toolbar to subscribe to feeds.

Anonymous said...

Great work Jasper! Just a few things I've noticed.
1) It would be nice if it excluded www.google.com/reader* by default ;)
2) If you (using a scroll mouse in Firefox 2.0 on Ubuntu 6.10) scroll down and then up, the feed icon stays in the lower spot as well. It gets a bit messy when you scroll a page down and then back up.
Still, a very nice and useful script!

thegooddale said...

Hi, excellent work with the GM script.

I did have one glitch however. It doesn't seem to work properly on this site: http://www.danwebb.net