I love RSS feeds. It makes digesting the internet so much more pleasant and efficient. There are a lot of desktop clients that are available for reading your RSS feeds but I prefer to use a combination of the Fluid app and Google Reader.
What Fluid does is create a site-specific browser so you can have an offline desktop version of Google Reader. Sounds simple enough, right? Well it is.
Here I’ll detail how to get this all set up, and then some tweaks to make your RSS reading even better.
Set Up Fluid and Google Reader
First you’re going to need to get Fluid and install Google reader as the site.
1. Download and run Fluid
2. Plug in Google Reader’s information.
Set up Fluid
3. Find the app in your Applications (or wherever you saved it) and run it
Make it “All Inclusive”
By defaut, when you click a link from your RSS feed it will open in a new browser. Well that’s no good for us; that’s messy and we’re trying to make a desktop client here. Here’s how to make your new links open in your wonderful new Google Reader app.
1. Go to Google Reader > Preferences > Advanced and click on “Allow browsing to any URL”.
Allow Browsing to Any URL
2. Go back to the main preferences window and hit “open in a new tab in the current window”.
Open in New Tab
Make it Pretty
That’s it, you’re done. You have a complete offline desktop client for Google Reader now. If you want to go a bit further you can make the app prettier by using a skin. I use Helvetireader. It even has a nice icon to accompany the application. Beautiful. Details of how to install Helvetireader can be found here.
Helvetireader
So that’s how I do my RSS feeds. How do you do yours?
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
I know there’s a Windows program by Mozilla called Prizm that does the same thing as Fluid, but I don’t have access to a Windows computer to check it out. Is it just as easy to use?
I love Newsstand for the iPhone. Syncs with Google Reader very nicely. I’ll have to try out Fluid… looks good.
Very interesting. Never heard this method. Good read! I use NetNewsWire & Sync it to my Google account. That allows it to be on my desktop and phone and iPod Touch.
Matthew, just found you blog yesterday. Liked the articles, so I subscribed.
I’ve been using Fluid for a little over a year for Gmail, Google Calendar, Pivotal Tracker, Friendfeed, and Facebook. Now time to add gReader. Thanks!
(Never used a PC, so I can’t help you with Prizm. I’ve heard that it gets the job done, though.)
Matt, this is exactly what I’d like to do. I just installed Fluid yesterday and want to run Google Reader as a desktop app. However, in the current version of Google Reader I can’t find options to “Allow browsing to any URL” or “open in a new tab in the current window”. Any idea how to make this happen in the current version of Google Reader? Thanks.
Matt, I posted too soon. I found the option under “Whitelist Preferences.” Many thanks for your post. This is going to be a great way to use Google Reader.
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