Here's a handy little tip:

If you're using the new Firefox 2 web browser, you can register myEarthLink Reader as the default feed reader you want to subscribe to news sources with. Here are the steps to set this up:

1. In Firefox 2, click this link: Add myEarthLink Reader to Firefox 2
2. When it asks if you want to add myEarthLink Reader as a feed reader, click Yes
3. Go to a feed you'd like to add to Reader. As an example, let's go to the Apple Movie Trailers page (link will open in a new window)
4. Click the orange feed icon () at the right side of the URL bar at the top of your browser window.
5. On the next screen, choose "myEarthLink Reader" from the dropdown menu
6. Click the checkbox next to "Always use myEarthLink Reader to subscribe to feeds".
7. Click the "Subscribe Now" button

Clicking the button will automatically add the feed to your Reader account. How cool is that? Now anytime you see that orange icon in your URL bar, you can click it to add the feed to myEarthLink Reader!

[via mozillalinks.org]

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last week, in addition to a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements, we rolled out a small but fun update to myEarthLink Reader. Many websites provide a small icon for your browser to display when you visit. We thought that would be a handy way to provide subtle visual differentiation when reading articles from different sources.

To show some of the variation found across sources, here are a few different ones that offer icons (with links to add them directly to your Reader source list):

The New York Times maintains its brand identity with the blackletter 'T'. Add this source

Sports Illustrated gets into the act on its numerous categories. This one happens to track their NFL coverage. Add this source

Engadget is the place to find that cutting edge gift for the gadget lover in your life (or to keep up with all the latest if you are the gadget lover in your life). Add this source

Get all the latest basketball scores directly from NBA.com. Add this source

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner breathe continued life into their popular book, Freakonomics, in their blog, which challenges conventional wisdom about everyday life from an economist's viewpoint. Add this source

This icon is actually from our friends at FeedBurner, who provide articles from O'Reilly Radar and hundreds of other sources (including our own Earthling blog). Add this source

The Sartorialist documents fashion on the streets of New York, and like many other sites, publishes through Google's Blogger weblog platform, which is the reason for the big orange "B". Add this source

When we can't find an icon for a given website, we borrow this generic icon from our sister site, myEarthLink Favorites. Blogging Stocks is a useful weblog from AOL Money & Finance. Add this source

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We're pleased to announce the My Reader module, available starting today on your myEarthLink Start Page. Now you can get a quick view into which of your sources have updated since your last visit, directly from your personalized EarthLink portal.

The module itself is very straightforward, a lot like what you see in the sidebar of Reader: the number of all recently updated articles, the names of the sources, and the number of articles for each source. Clicking any of the sources will take you directly to that source's page in Reader. Clicking the "All Recently Updated Articles" link will take you to your Reader home page.

Why not give it a try? Add the My Reader module to your myEarthLink Start Page.

If that shortcut is to easy for you, you can also add the module from the "Add a Feature" module directly on your Start Page, or from the Edit this Page link (choose it from the dropdown menu, and you can position it in the middle or right column).

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You may have seen this feature in an older incarnation, but it's worth pointing out the new version. The idea is simple: put a divider between articles that are new since your last visit and the older articles. EarthLink's blogger, Dave Coustan, said he thinks of this as the divider you use at a grocery check-out counter to separate your fresh halibut steaks from the next customer's frozen fish sticks.

Fig. 1: Check-out Divider

It's easy to use. Simply read (or "check out") your new articles until you see the divider. Those are your "fresh" articles. Everything below the divider was there on your previous visit to Reader.

Fig. 2: Effective Use of the Divider

We tried to keep it visually subtle so that your eyes wouldn't immediately jump to it, but distinctive enough for you to easily recognize once you did reach it.

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 7:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Today we introduced a number of enhancements to myEarthLink Reader. I'm going to introduce each in a series of short blog entries.

We've added freshness indicators to Your Sources. In the sidebar on your Reader page, there's an item called Your Sources that you can click to expand and see an alphabetical list of every source you're tracking. What you previously couldn't see was when each of these had updated.

Our freshness indicators provide at-a-glance cues to what sources have and have not updated recently. Here's the key:

• Very Fresh: updated within the past 24 hours
• Fresh: updated within the past week
• OK: updated within the past month
• Stale: more than one month old

We made the red and green indicators larger than the black and gray, since you're likely to be more interested in sources that have updated very recently or ones that have gone stale.

If you want more information, place your cursor over the indicator, and you'll get a tooltip showing the last time that source was updated. This is an easy way of keeping track of how fresh your news is and whether you might want to Manage Sources to remove those that haven't updated in a long time.

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 8:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As much as a balanced breakfast, a healthy regimen of news reading can start your day off right. Here are two tips to help you consume 100% of your recommended daily allowance of news articles and blog posts in myEarthLink Reader:

Add to myReader Button

A great way to keep a steady influx of your interests flowing into myEarthLink Reader is to use the Add to my Reader toolbar button. I use this often to quickly add a news source to myReader from the web site I want to track. Using either the Mozilla Firefox or Apple Safari browser, I can easily tell when a web site has a feed I can add to myReader. These indicators appear:

Firefox:    Safari:

Incidentally, the next version of Microsoft Internet Explorer will use the same orange icon as Firefox, which we at EarthLink are thrilled about, since it so nicely matches our color palette.

After adding the toolbar button to whichever browser you use, you're just a click away from adding a website to the sources you watch.

Manage Sources

I personally track between 150 and 200 sources at any given time in myReader. I use the Manage Sources page to weed out sources that are either stale or no longer interest me.

On the Manage Sources page, you can:

• Edit the title and description of any source you subscribe to
• Find out the last time each of your sources updated with a new article
• Be alerted to sources that haven't updated in the past month, and therefore...
• Remove sources you no longer want to track

Making it easy to add and remove sources based on your interests will keep your myReader experience fresh and relevant, with daily and even hourly updates of the things you want to see.

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Want to find out if you have time for that extra cup of coffee before venturing out into traffic in the morning? Looking for the hottest deals on a digital camera? Getting traffic conditions and shopping deals are just a couple of the many highly useful things you can do with myReader, aside from keeping up with the latest news. Just check out the long list of Things You Can Do With RSS by Tim Yang.

Posted by Reader Staff at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today, we're going to talk about Recently Updated.

We think Recently Updated is the most important section in your sidebar, because that's where myReader tells you what's new since your last visit. As we were building myEarthLink Reader, our team agreed that one of the things we disliked about other news reader applications was the concept of Read and Unread Articles. For some of us news junkies, missing a day would mean you could have 500 or more "unread articles"! Yuck.

Our idea for Recently Updated is that we'll show you a list of all your sources and how many articles have updated since your last visit, but you don't have to slog through them all. Just pick and choose from the list of sources if you're in a hurry, or scroll down the page and peruse the articles if you've got some time. After a while, these are no longer recent updates in your world, and so we don't highlight them.

Since myEarthLink Reader is a brand new application, we'll be tweaking and adjusting features like how we decide what is Recently Updated for you. Our goal is to make it the best way to track your online sources. You can help us improve by giving us your feedback.

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)