this post is a continuation of an earlier article about newsfeeds and rss. in today’s episode, I will talk about how to make your rss subscriptions and your reading therof (therefrom?) more efficient and fun. this post will focus on google reader; stay tuned for posts on the sage reader and feedly.
now that you know what that orange symbol means, I’m sure you’ve been busy subscribing hither and yon and your subscriptions are a sloppy mess.
organizing your reading
but wait! you may be saying. how did you get all your subscriptions into those cool folders? great question, because it brings us to organizing your news feeds.
google reader offers the ability to place your subscriptions into folders:
At the bottom of the subscriptions listing on the main google reader page, you will see a link to manage your subscriptions. clicking that link brings you to the subscriptions tab on thereader’s settings page. here you can rename or delete your subscriptions. you can also manage folders. oddly, the only place to create folders is on the subscriptions tab. you cannot create folders on the folders tab. subscriptions can be included in more than one folder, but you’ll probably want to keep them in just one. For those with a steady hand, it’s also possible to darg and drop new subscriptions into folders after creating the newsfeed.
google redesigned 
the basic design of the google reader is okay, but designers wasted no time in reworking the look. the one I like the best is google redesigned. google reader is just one of the customizations in this firefox extension: you can also choose to have similar changes applied to your gmail and google calendar. so instead of the bland main street look above, you get the ubercool downtown look here:
the goodies tab on the reader settings page will turn you on to some other cool things you can do with google reader. put it on your igoogle home page. get one-click convenience with a toolbar icon. I like google reader a lot, but as I said in the first post, soon you’ll get to hear about my favorite, the sage reader. stay tuned!
