Google Reader: GWT is back!!
August 6th, 2008
My request(actually ‘our’ request) is fulfilled by Google now. That’s really COOL!
I’ve tried Readerburner iphone version before, when GWT is not allowed. It works fine, the only limitation i think is that i can’t import all my own feeds there.
Now i’ll swich back to Google Reader, and keep readerburner bookmarked as well.
One Feature Request for New Google Reader
July 13th, 2008
In the morning of July 12, 2008(Beijing Time), as usual, I launched Google Reader from my Safari’ bookmarks in the iphone and wanna see if anything could interest me a little.
Guess what? I didn see the old and familiar Reader interface. Instead, i saw the New one. Actually i did try it when it’s still beta before. I even bookmarked it, for later use.
The New Reader is cool, in some way. However, there’s one very important feature missing compared to the Old one: mobiled the targeted html pages. Let me remind you of that with the following screenshot.
Why is it such an important feature, anyway? You may wonder. Well, I’ve explained before on this post. And after some googling, I’ve found i’m not the only one.
There’s a post titled See original - mobile vs. full HTML - Please fix created by in the Google Reader Team’s groups, which exactly says the same thing. I already left my agree comment there.
So in all, we’d like to see this cut feature could be able to appear in the New Reader again some time in future.
I have no idea of how Google chooses the features for their product, but I do hear that Google treats user feedback very seriously. Hopefully Google will not let us down this time.
Google Reader for iPhone: Two UI Tweaks
January 28th, 2008
1. Newly added ‘Add subscription’
See screenshots above. By clicking that link, you will be navigated to the feed discovering page, where you can easily search and add more subscriptions you like.
2. clicking ‘See original’ will Open a new browser window
See the picture below for the page where the ‘See original’ link is.
It’s a much more browsing-friendly than before while opening the link in the same window. You will know it if you read news via feeds every day like me.
yidong.google.com
January 16th, 2008
If you enter google.com in iphone’s safari browser, by default you will redirect to google.cn sometime, which may not be what you want. If so, try yidong.google.com.
I know it’s a Chinese PinYin for the word ‘mobile’(移动), but it does be able to take you to google’s default global-search, other than the Chinese-only one.
Besides,there you can also see the google’s new move on web apps esp. for iphone as below.
PR Update To 3
January 12th, 2008
Not too much news on this PageRank update so far. But now that both Search Engine Roundtable and searchnewz have reported similar PR drop cases, guess i should say today is my day 
Well, it’s not easy anyway. About two and an half months has passed since the last update on the end of Oct. 2007. and during these days this site has been kept posting new and original articles all along. Google may see this and think time to present a reward now
Cheers
Google Reader for iPhone - Webpage Reformatted
December 22nd, 2007
There’s one setting in Google Reader called ‘Reformat lined web pages for mobile browsers.‘ which is VERY useful for me. And here’s the reasons:
1.Take Google Reader as a Proxy
By checking this option, I can read news from websites which provide feeds and are blocked in China, like *.blogspot.com. I do read news from Google Official Blog, actually.
2.Save Money When Connecting Via EDGE/GPRS
It’s true. And it’s done by decreasing the amount of downloading files while reformatting the web pages. See the following two pictures, left is orginal and right is the reformatted one:
Yes, you can see the later layout is a mass. Actually that’s because the CSS file which controls how the webpage’s layout and display will be has not been downloaded to your mobile browser, say my iphone’s safari.
Furthermore, if there’s some flash ads in the original page, they won’t be downloaded, either.
In other words, the number of downloading bytes from the server to your browser is less than a normal page visit before reformatted. So, your monthly data usage is less and you cost less, too.
A greedy request here: Can Google Reader turn the reformatting option on when it detects the current net connection is via EDGE/GPRS while off via Wifi? You know, when cost is not a problem anymore, i’d love to see an CSS-based clean web page
An Suggestion to Google Webmaster Tool
October 28th, 2007
Here’s the how the issue comes from.
I find two Not found URLs in Google’s
webmaster tools. And i wanna fix it.
But Google doesn’t tell me which page the error URLs are located in.
Fortunately this site is still young and there’s only 40 articles in it. After three searches in the source of the article pages, I found the error pages and then make them right. The whole process cost me about 5 minutes.
It’s not such a long time, but what if this happened in an aged site, like TechCrunch, which has hundreds of posts and pages? How and how much could the webmaster locate the error pages and fix the issue efficiently?
Well, it’s not a big deal, but we webmasters do benefit from its fix. And i’m sure it’s a win-win to google and website owners as well.
I’ve Got a PR!
October 27th, 2007
Not a high value, but much better than nil, anyway .
Yes, it’s 2.
Today is Oc.27, 2007. And I’m gonna see when it grows to 3 or 4
Mp3Tag:Add Album Art Easily for Songs in iPhone
October 14th, 2007
As said,
“Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata (ID3, Vorbis Comments and APE) of common audio formats.”
I love two of its features most:
1. batch edit tag info
Just add the album songs into Mp3Tag then edit as whatever you want. very awesome.
2. get album art from online database like amazon.
since this feature highly depend on your orginal mp3’s orginal tag info which most likely are very few sometimes even wrong, I for now still use google image search to get the picture for the album manually, then set it with the above feature.
Of course, Mp3Tag is free. I love freeware
And sure you can donate to them if you could.
How To Track iPhone’s Latest News
September 4th, 2007
Thanks God, We have internet !
For me, I use two work-arounds:
1. Google Alert.
Type ‘iphone’ into search term textbox and enter your email, you’re done. simple and easy.
The cons of alert is not so latest, compared with the following methods, if you’ve got enough time. Otherwise, Alert is your best bet.
I believe in the power of community
3. Google News Search and Blog Search for iphone.
Based on my experience, Blog Search can give you more recent news than News Search. I’m sure that’s because the latter represents a more formal and confirmed version of news.
Anyway, I use both.
