Program features
Feature of TPGoogleReader - each one explained in a few words.
I'll try to keep this page up to date. When I update it, I'll update the version number below so that you always know which version it is for.
TPGoogleReader 0.9.2
TPGR Icon
TPGoogleReader displays an icon to the right of the address bar. Normally it is green, but when feeds are detected on a page, it blinks and finally remains orange. There can be a number in red or green displayed on it, or a letter A. Here's what is the meaning of the number:
- When the number is red (aka the red number), it shows how many unread items are there in Google Reader. If you go to Google Reader, you'll see the same number as the count of unread items. When there are no unread items, instead of a red zero, there's nothing displayed on the icon.
- When the number is green (aka the green number), it means that the extension is in auto-opening mode (see below), and the number tells how many browser tabs were automatically opened, and have not yet been visited by you.
- A grey letter A can be displayed, which means that TPGR is in the auto-opening mode, but there are no new auto-opened tabs.
- Other things might appear in the icon if you clicked one of the open N links placed on the popup (see below), or when TPGR is in auto-opening mode but is waiting on a limit (see below). Meaning of these will be explained in the corresponding sections below.
Auto-opening mode
TPGoogleReader can be used in two modes:
- Manual mode - number on the icon just shows how many unread items are there in GR, and items can be opened using the open N links.
- Auto-opening mode (automatic mode) - in this mode all new unread items in GR are instantly opened in new browser tabs. New tabs appear on the right side of the opened tabs, and are in the background, so that they do not interfere with anything you're doing in the browser. All you have to do is to look whether there are new tabs (or look at the green number on the icon that tells how many new tabs there are) and switch to these tabs to read the new items. Items are automatically marked as read in Google Reader, so if you go to GR, you'll see no new items.
To switch between the manual and automatic mode, open the popup by clicking the icon and check or uncheck the checkbox on it.
Popup
Popup is a small window that opens when you click the TPGR icon. There is a lot of useful things on it. Hover mouse on any of the items in the popup to see a tooltip with additional information.
- Feeds list - list of feeds detected on the current page (details below). Will not be present if there are no feeds to display.
- In the next row:
- Link to Google Reader, or other feed reader (depends on the options, details in the Options section).
- Checkbox that switches between the manual and automatic mode. Check the checkbox to enable the automatic mode.
- In the next row:
- Number of unread items in Google Reader, and number of items auto-opened in new background tabs.
- Below are the open N links: they are links that say open next, open five, open ten and so on. They are only visible when there are unread items in GR, so normally they are never visible in the auto-opening mode, when all items get opened automatically. The exception is when TPGR waits on a limit (see below). After clicking one of the open N links, while the N items are opened, the text on the icon starts with ^ to denote this.
- Number of auto-opened and not visited tabs. This is the same as the green number on the icon in automatic mode.
- The next row is only visible if there are unread items in GR and shows a breakdown of number of unread items by folders defined in Google Reader. If there are no folders, this row is not displayed.
- The Facebook box, reminding of the TPGoogleReader Facebook Page.
- Footer - displaying the current version of TPGoogleReader. Most parts of the footer are links - to TPGR page, to the Change log, to Author's profile and to TPGR Options page.
All elements of the popup can be disabled in the Options, if you decide that you don't need them. If items are disabled, there will appear a little arrow in the bottom right of the popup that you can click to display all the disabled sections. This will not reënable the sections, but just display them for this one time. The arrow itself can also be disabled.
Feeds list
Feeds list is a list of all feeds provided by the current page. The list is displayed at the top of the popup. Each element in the list represents a separate feed, and consists of several elements.
- Main of them is the name of the feed, which is a link to open the feed in Google Reader, or some other reader, depending on what's configured in the options. Just to the left of the name is the icon of the reader that will open the items.
- To the left of the name and the default reader icon there might be icons of other readers (this is also configured in the options). Clicking them will open the feed in this specific reader. The first icon from the left might be a link to open the feed as raw XML view. This is probably not useful for normal users, just for power users that want to test feeds or do other suspicious stuff.
- TPGoogleReader has also support for feeds generated by Page2RSS - if a page provides no feeds, the feed list contains a link to view the feed generated by Page2RSS. Apart from the above elements, this has also a Page2RSS icon to the right of it. Clicking it opens the feed in the Page2RSS viewer.
Options
TPGR behaviour is very configurable. This section describes all the options in the Options page, divided into subsections, just like the options are divided into tabs.
Apart from the tabs, on the Options page there is a Facebook Page box, a link to the Change log where a list of (most of) the TPGR releases is available, and a couple of links to various resources related to TPGR.
Basic
The basic configuration of the extension.
- The main feed reader - TPGR supports previewing feeds not only in Google Reader, but also in other readers. For now the only other option is Feedly (and this requires having the Feedly Chrome Extension installed). The default reader is used to open feeds when you click their names on the feeds list, as a general subscriptions viewer when you click the link to reader on the popup, and to open feeds when you click a direct link to a feed (see below). Simply set this to the reader you like best.
- Other available readers - here you can select what other readers will be available, apart from the one set as the default. The icons of the other readers will be placed to the left of each feed in feeds list as an option to open it in this specific reader.
- Detect feeds on pages - uncheck this to use TPGR only to read feeds and not subscribe to them. This is useful if you think another extension works better for subscribing. If unchecked, the feeds list will never be displayed, and the TPGR icon will never turn orange.
- Generate feeds for pages - select whether to display the feed generated by Page2RSS when page has no feeds, or to display it always, or never.
- Open newest items first - by default the auto-opening mode and the open N links open oldest items first. This seems to me the natural order of opening - the same as the order of items appearing. But if you prefer to have newest items opened first, check this option.
Popup
Here you can disable various sections of the popup, if you don't need everything that is there. The sections are:
- The line with go to reader link and auto-opening mode checkbox.
- The line with unread items count, the open N links, and the number of unread tabs count.
- Unread counts by folders.
- The Facebook box.
- The footer, with various links. It will still be displayed, even if disabled, after TPGR update, to inform you about the update.
- The expander arrow - if it is enabled, but some popup sections are disabled, a tiny arrow on the popup will expand it to see all the disabled sections, too. This will be temporary - it will not enable the sections in the options.
- You can also configure which of the open N links should be displayed on the popup.
Tabs opening
Various options related to automatically opening items.
- Items to open at browser start - set this to something non-zero to make the extension open the specified number of new items after you start the browser and TPGR finds new items. If there are less new items than this setting specified, TPGR simply switches to the automatic mode. The same thing happens if a limit is specified (the two options described below) and just switching to the auto-opening mode will, as a result of the limits, not open more items than this setting specifies. So, in general, it's best to set one or both of the limit settings to reasonable values, and set this to something large, like 100, because this will only cause TPGR to go into the automatic mode after Chrome starts, and you won't end up with a hundred tabs opened, because of the limits.
- Opened tabs limit - limit to the number of tabs in a single Chrome window. A reasonable value depends on what you feel is a lot of tabs. I'd say 30 is a safe value. If you get to this limit and still have more unread items and you want to read them anyway, either open a new Chrome window (Ctrl+N) and switch it to the automatic mode, or open the popup and click one of the open N links, because items opened in this way are not affected by the limits (unless this is changed in the options, below).
- Unread auto-opened tabs limit - this is a limit to the number of automatically opened and unread tabs, in other words - limit to the value displayed on the icon in green. You might prefer to disable this limit completely, or to set it to something like 5 or 10. Then, even if your tabs limit (the one above) is 30, and you have only 5 tabs already opened, TPGR will not open 35 tabs, but just 5 or 10.
- Text on the icon when limited - when TPGoogleReader waits on a limit (meaning it is in automatic mode and there are unread items in GR, but they cannot be opened because of one or both of the limits), the text on the icon changes to reflect this. It is normally in the form <the green number>+<the red number>, displaying in this way both the number of opened tabs and the number of items that are blocked by the limit, but this can be changed here.
- Use limits in manual mode - enable this to make the limits effective also when you click one of the open N links.
- Skip visited items - imagine the following scenario:
- A new item appears on page X that you are subscribed to in Google Reader, but Google Reader has not yet refreshed the feed so the new item is not visible in it and thus is not opened by TPGR.
- You visit the page (for whatever reason) and see the new item. You open the item and read it.
- Finally Google Reader refreshes the page's feed and the item that you've already read lands in your unread items.
In this situation, if you enable skipping visited items, TPGoogleReader checks the Chrome history and determines that you've already seen this entry, and automatically marks it as read without opening (both in auto and manual mode; it just marks it as read because it has been read). This simply saves you some hmm, I've already seen this impressions.
Multi-clicks
TPGR supports setting custom actions when the icon is clicked, double-clicked or triple-clicked. Note that this is not natively supported by Chrome, but rather is some sort of a workaround. It works well most of the time, unless you click too fast, or too slow, or something just does not work. Also note that a double-click set on a single programmable mouse button will probably not work.
The options available for clicking, double-clicking and triple-clicking are:
- Open the popup (the default for a single click)
- Open the default reader
- Open the first feed on the current page in the default reader
- Toggle between manual and automatic mode
- Open next unread item, open five, ... (just like the open N links)
If you set all three to, say, opening the reader, and so you cannot get to the popup, then either right-click the icon, select Options and change the unlucky settings, or quad-click, which always opens the popup.
Tweaks
This tab has various not-so-important settings that might just make TPGR work more to your liking.
- Mark tab as read delay - when a tab is auto-opened, it is considered unread (which is reflected by the value of the green number) unless you switch to this tab and spend there at least the amount of time specified in this setting. The default is just a few seconds - this delay is only to prevent marking a tab as read just because you accidentally switched to it for a moment.
- Blink icon on feed detection - how many times the icon should blink orange-green when a feed is detected. If you set this to zero, the icon will simply turn orange.
- How to open reader - whether to reuse an already opened reader tab or not.
- How to open feeds in reader - similar as above.
- Bypass FeedBurner feed pages - If this is checked, FeedBurner feed pages are treated the same as direct feed links - they are opened in raw XML view or in the default reader, dependent on the options. The FeedBurner feed view is rather poor so this is enabled by default. (Sometimes TPGR is unable to generate XML view of a FeedBurner page, it will then try to open the feed in the default reader.)
For Geeks
Some options not needed by most of the users.
- Use HTTPS - whether Google Reader should always be contacted using the encrypted https: protocol.
- Show feed content as XML - Whether to show feed as raw XML when a direct feed link is clicked (more below). If disabled, feed is opened in the default reader.
Other features
Less important feature descriptions go here.
Direct feed link
When a direct feed link is clicked, like this one: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/feeds/news.rss normally Chrome displays a mess. With TPGoogleReader installed, this is handled somewhat nicer. By default, such feed link is redirected to the feed's view in the default reader. In the options for Geeks this can be changed to displaying the feed as a monospace formatted XML (no syntax coloring though). The raw XML view has also links to feed readers.
Data fetching
TPGoogleReader contacts Google Reader to get the unread items and items counts by using the existing cookies. This means that TPGR does not want to know your Google password, it only requires that you log into Google Reader (after that, you can close the tabs where you did this and TPGR will still work).
Normally data is fetched from Google Reader once in five minutes. Apart from that, data fetch is caused by:
- Connection error - after an error a retry attempt is made after just several seconds (after consecutive errors the interval is made longer not to kill the machine just because the network is unavailable).
- Opening the popup.
- Closing any of the Google Reader tabs, or tab of any other of the supported readers. This allows you to open Google Reader and read some items directly there, then close the tab, and have the unread count instantly refreshed.
Non-program features
There are also things it's good to know about TPGoogleReader that are not parts of the program.
There is a TPChromeExtensions blog where notes about important TPGoogleReader updates are posted.
TPGoogleReader has a Facebook Page. If you like TPGR, please like it on Facebook. I post there information about what features you can expect in the next TPGR update and other things.
There is a TPGR Survey that will hopefully help improve the program further.
Donation
If you think that TPGoogleReader is a good and useful piece of software, please consider a small donation.
Donation via PayPal. Please note that PayPal subtracts about + 2.9% from your donation if you make it from a credit card.
thanks