Gmail is my Firefox home page and is always open as long as Firefox is there. So I wrote this Greasemonkey script to show Google Reader’s unread count in the nav-bar of Gmail. A good place, isn’t it?
The script checks for the unread count every 8 minutes. But after you click the “Reader” link, it checks the count 1 minute later and extend the interval by 1 minute after every check until the interval returns to 8 minutes again.
Install Greasemonkey，and then install this script。
Handy new feature coming soon…
I use Gmail instead of iGoogle as browser home page. But I don’t want a complete integration. Just alert me the unread count and I will check it when I have time.
I’m a fan of Google Reader. Although FeedDemon went free recently and it offers synchronization with NewsGator which is great attraction for many people, I still couldn’t drop Google Reader.
However the panel above the subscription list takes up too much space for my humble screen resolution of 1024×768. As Google rolled out the much complained “Friends’ shared items” feature, it became an urgent task for me to hide the annoying but never used panel. It took up 1/3 of the vertical space on the left sidebar!
No, not just hiding. Sometimes I need to clear the number of unread friends’ shared items. So it should be a “toggler” like the sidebar (or nav-bar as called by Google) toggler natively built in Google Reader. Like this:
Before hiding, with mouse hovering on the toggler:
When the panel is hidden:
You can still open it at any time. Basically, it works in the same way as the native sidebar toggler.
This is done by writing a user script for Greasemonkey, so you must have Greasemonkey installed to use it.