Chris Tech Blog

I have started using Safari 4 for Windows on my Netbook recently after hearing it was faster than Chrome. It’s been a few days and I am slowly sorting through missing features and finding ways to “work around” the few shortcoming I have discovered. One of the biggest and most annoying (to me at any rate) is the built in RSS reader functionality in Safari 4.

Now I understand why Safari was designed to function as a feed reader when clicking the RSS button in the address bar. But this behavior is the opposite of what happens in my other browsers – namely a feed should be detected and I should be given the option of how I wish to subscribe to it. I am a big Google Reader fan. I don’t want to see a feed in a regular browser window. Frankly, its ugly, has limited functionality and defeats the reason for even having the feed in the first place (just my opinion of course). And on pages without a “Subscribe to Feed” button, it’s a real PITA to subscribe in Reader.

After a little bit of research and scrubbing for solutions, I came across a bookmarklet for detecting the feed on the page being viewed and subscribing to that feed in GReader. Of course it was in the last place I looked, right on the Google Reader Blog itself.

It’s very slick and works like it should. I To install it, simply drag the bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmark bar (if you are using IE, you’re on your own as they do not support that drag and drop method). The one I chose to use is the simple Subscribe bookmarklet. You can find it and some other goodies at the following Google blog page…

Subscribing to feeds via little Google buttons

Now, when you are visiting a page that contains an RSS feed, just click the bookmarklet and you will be taken to Google Reader and the current feed will be ready for the push of the Subscribe button.

Now if only I could right click a bookmark in a folder to open it in a new tab. I will keep searching for that fix.