The Hickensian

16.01.08 gReader 1.4 - 'The my goodness I almost gave up on this one' release

33 comments
Tagged with: google, googlereader, greader, theme

Updating the gReader theme to work with the new Friends Shared Items feature introduced last year, has been, quite frankly, a royal pain the arse. I almost gave up on the theme a few times along the way, but I’m chuffed to be able to say, here’s the updated theme! I don’t doubt that this has introduced new bugs, but let me off the hook for now eh?

Google Reader theme - new sidebar

Changes for 1.4

Supports the friends shared items feature – the sidebar reflows when the shared items is toggled on/off
Removed a fair few lines of redundant code
New icons! Updated trends, and wee ‘friends’ icons.
Leopard-ized sidebar, with new, smaller folder icons, and generally a bit tightened up. The Leopard style makes the most sense with the Friends and Show lists
Page view tabs (‘Expanded view’ & ‘List view’) are now more osx-y.
Various other bug fixes, like ‘Refresh’ on the status bar being clickable again. Thanks must go to Daniel Haas, Matt Wiebe, Martin Ström, Tomasz ?wik and ChoGGi for all submitting patches! It’s people like you that make me keep on updating this theme.

Download gReader.zip | Update on userstyles.org | How to Install

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No.1

∞ Sam Rayner said 755 days ago:

Fantastic. Thanks for all your had work Jon. I’ve been loving this theme since your first release :)

No.2

∞ Ben Kessler said 755 days ago:

I follow you on Twitter and just got the link for this. Thanks SO much. I have been using this theme forever and absolutely love it.

No.3

∞ Jared Christensen said 755 days ago:

‘Tis beautiful. Thank you!

No.4

∞ Matt Wilcox said 755 days ago:

oo, very pretty. Thanks :)

No.5

∞ Ed said 755 days ago:

OK, I’m clearly dumb, I’ve copied this to my User Style Sheets Location for Stand, turned Site Alteration on and set www.google.com to use the style sheet, but nothing changes.

I’ve refreshed the page and relaunched Safari. If you know where I’m going wrong please enlighten me, I can take the humiliation!

No.6

∞ Levi Figueira said 755 days ago:

AWESOME!!
Almost makes me want to drop NNW and run back to GR… (that I still love)

If it wasn’t for the fact that I’ve noticed that I check my feeds more frequently on NNW avoiding huge pile ups, I’d use GR without a doubt!

Oh boy, with this update, you’re really having me consider going back to it!!!!!! grrrrrrr

Nice work ;)

No.7

∞ Sam Daams said 755 days ago:

You’re a legend Jon! I love the theme :)

No.8

∞ Jason Mevius said 755 days ago:

Thanks so much, this helped me get hooked on Reader.

No.9

∞ jonas said 755 days ago:

Thanks! i love it!

No.10

∞ Peter said 755 days ago:

Looks nice. Are any other Safari users seeing a gap under the header like this? I had it in the 1.3.x version too, but only in Safari.

No.11

∞ Bob said 755 days ago:

Wow. Another beautiful theme, thanks!

@Ed: I couldn’t get it to work either with safaristand in Safari 3 (OS X 10.4.11), so instead took the advice on the installing theme page – use creammonkey (now greasekit) which is easily installed ‘cause its a SIMBL plugin (as is safaristand) restart Safari, and then on this page follow the link to the userscripts page, install the first one, then follow that link to the fancy graphics one, and voila! Reload google reader and it should work.

@Peter: Nope, no border, the search and header are tight together.
Hope this stays perfect for quite a while!

Thanks again.

No.12

∞ Corvida said 755 days ago:

This is my first time checking this out. I’ll be trying it in Opera and Firefox. Wish me luck and thanks!

No.13

∞ Michael B said 755 days ago:

Lovely! Keep up the good work!

No.14

∞ Robin said 755 days ago:

Unfortunately, it seems GreaseKit causes my Safari to freeze up, going at 99% CPU. The screenshot’s really, really enticing though…

No.15

∞ Chris Pederick said 755 days ago:

You sir, are a god. Once again, great work.

No.16

∞ Philippe said 754 days ago:

There seems to be a sort of bug or conflict for the styling of the search form at the top. In Gecko 1.9 (Camino trunk builds and Fx 3 b nightly builds). The background image is not applied at all on the text field and submit button.
The bizarre thing is: it works correctly on a minimal test case.

Anyway: to fix: add ‘-moz-appearance:none;’ to both #search-input and #search-submit.

No.17

∞ Marcus said 754 days ago:

I wish there was a way to style Google Reader in Safari for Windows :( … Like a webbased greasemonkey :<

No.18

∞ Gilbert said 754 days ago:

@Marcus

If you just use Safari for Windows for Google reader then ou can download the stylesheet from here, Fire Up Safari then go to

Edit >> Preferences >> Advanced Tab, there is an option to change the style sheet.

It doesn’t work on a site by site basis, but if you’re just using Safari for Google Reader and for site testing then it’s not a massive hardship to go in and remove the stylesheet when you do your testing.

No.19

∞ Matt Wiebe said 754 days ago:

You’re welcome for the (very small) patch, but thanks to you for your incredible work on this theme!

No.20

∞ alex said 754 days ago:

Hello!
We added your blog to our site: http://www.recentnews.co.uk
We develop a portal, collect the news and blog posts.

Kind regards

No.21

∞ Marcus said 754 days ago:

@Gilbert: Too bad Safari is my main browser then :<

No.22

∞ Jono said 754 days ago:

Are there any more detailed instructions for using the css file with SafariStand or PithHelmet? Everything I try crashes Safari on Leopard.

Trying the load the GreaseKit script at userstyles.org crashes Safari (always did on Tiger too).
And if I add the css file to SafariStand or PithHelmet then go to Google Reader those make Safari hang as well :(

No.23

∞ Adam said 754 days ago:

Ah, excellent news. Please don’t give up on this project, it released me from the clutches of Newsfire. Incase anyone is interested, this make the occasionally active project, http://www.poetsch.org/weblog/336/readomatic-early-alpha all the more usable.

No.24

∞ Justin Blanton said 754 days ago:

Thanks Jon — your hard work is much appreciated.

No.25

∞ VJ said 753 days ago:

I had alot of problems with that feature too

No.26

∞ mediter said 751 days ago:

h3. the following issues bugs me a lot

# feed settings partially covered by the news items, actually it’s now below the news item listing

# Friends’ Shared Items has too much space between itself and the triangle to its left

# items count just beside All Items is way over to the right

No.27

∞ mediter said 751 days ago:

Your Textile feature provided in the comment doesn’t seem to work.

My comment checks out just fine on http://textism.com/tools/textile/, but it doesn’t get converted here.

So you may want to fix this.

No.28

∞ Jon Hicks said 751 days ago:

@mediter – you come across as rude and ungrateful, you may want to fix that.

No.29

∞ Desides said 750 days ago:

Jon, I’ve been using this theme since the beginning, and it’s an amazing facelift. Thanks yet again for creating it.

That said, I’m having some trouble here. I installed 1.4 through Stylish (I’m using Firefox 2 on Windows) went to Google Reader, and saw this.

http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/9520/whoawhatac1.png

I have no idea what the heck is happening here or why.

No.30

∞ mediter said 750 days ago:

@Jon Hicks

Sorry that I sounded rude and ungrateful in my previous comments. I am truly very very sorry for that!

Thank you for this great work of art ! Sorry for my ignorance that I didn’t express my gratitude before !

No.31

∞ Jon Hicks said 750 days ago:

Just to confirm, I’m not looking for praise here! You don’t have to grovel before mentioning a bug.

A theme like this ALWAYS GOING TO HAVE BUGS. Its unavoidable sadly, there is just too much going in Google Reader. It’s just that I worked bloody hard to get it to this state, so if a comment comes across as rude I’m tempted to give up on it.

When you experience bugs, its helpful to let me know a browser and its version, and what platform it’s on if there is a chance of fixing it. Better is to supply a screenshot, even better supply a patch! Life is too short to fix bugs, but sometimes I get the time to look at some of the issues.

No.32

∞ Jono Hunt said 749 days ago:

Just a bit of info on my problem loading the css file (in case it helps anyone else).

The problem turned out to be with SafariBlock (didn’t even realise I still had it installed). After I removed that it’s working fine.

And looking better than ever, thanks a lot Jon!

No.33

∞ Jon Hicks said 748 days ago:

Thanks for that Jono – I’ve added it to the installation instructions!