Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

3 Google Reader Features Most People Don’t Use

I am sharing here three features in Google Reader that people rarely use.

Subscribe to an RSS without knowing its URL:

Yes! You don’t need to know the URL to RSS for a site/blog. If that site/blog provides RSS feed it most probably carries a META tag in its page to point to that url. When you are viewing a site and find it promising enough to subscribe its RSS feed, you don’t need to search for the RSS url. Just copy the current URL that you are visiting from the address bar and paste it in the Dialog that appears in the Google Reader when you click on “Add a subscription”. Google Reader will parse the page and detect the RSS url and the next moment you will be subscribed to it.

Force a feed ‘Refresh’

By default all the feeds that you add to Google Reader are checked for update after every 3 or more hours. So if you are reading a feed which was checked by Google an hour ago, and just a few minutes back a post appeared on the blog, chances are that you will not shown that post on Google Reader for the next two hours as Google Reader itself is not aware of the development. You can though force Google to check the feed by pressing the “Refresh” button

This feature is particularly useful for blog owners who can use this feature after making a post, so the post is immediately available to other Google Reader users too.

Translate to your own Language

Language should not be a barrier between you and knowledge. Google Translate is a service that allows you to translate text or full pages between 41 languages. It auto-detects the language used in a text/page and translates it to the desired language. This capability is now integrated into Google Reader too.

Subscribe a feed in some foreign language and under feed settings check “Translate into my Language”…

… and in no time you will get to read the translated feed.

Now a bad news the ‘My Language’ as mentioned above is the language that you set in the Language settings and has only 21 options as shown below. These are the ones for which the complete Google Reader interface is available. So if my want to read feeds translated from Hindi to English, I can do so by setting ‘My Language’ as English, but if I want to read English feeds in Hindi it’s not possible now until the Google Reader is available in Hindi interface too.