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We at the Reader team like to receive some visual stimulation with our reading, so we're subscribed to a bunch of photo feeds. It's great that RSS and Atom can deliver more than just text, but it gets boring to view everything in the exact same fashion.

We've therefore come up with what we call "photo templates," which is a special display mode we have for photo sites. When it's triggered, we try our best to expand thumbnails to full-size photos. Additionally, on the right side of the screen we display a list of clickable thumbnails of other photos from that feed, so that you can cherry-pick the best ones to view. Right now we support the feeds from a few sites; here's a list of them and a sample feed from each one:

• Buzznet - sample feed
• Flickr - sample feed
• Fotki - sample feed
• smugmug - sample feed
• Textamerica.com - sample feed

This is great if you use one of these photo services, but what about other sites or self-hosted photo blogs? For now we've specifically whitelisted the above five sites for photo template support. This doesn't scale that well - there's thousands of sites and only a few overworked Reader engineers.

Our plan is to support the Media RSS extension to RSS and Atom (the thumbnail and content tags are most relevant to photo feeds). This way, if you include the right tags, Reader will be able to display your feed with the photo template without us having to do any work. The Media RSS spec is pretty thorough, and you can use Flickr's feeds as examples of usage.

Everything that you see in Reader is available as an Atom feed. While that's normally only of interest to Atom fetishists, it does mean that you can view your reading list in new and interesting ways.

Reading lists as screensavers

Mac OS X Tiger has a nifty screensaver that can display any feed with cool swooshing text. Here's how to view your reading list in it:

1. Using Safari 2.0, load your reading list feed
2. Add a bookmark for that feed
3. in the "Desktop & Screen Saver" preference pane, select "RSS Visualizer"
4. From the "Options..." sheet, pick your reading list
5. Enjoy your new screensaver!

Windows users shouldn't despair, there are plenty of options for that platform too.

Reading lists as Live Bookmarks

Firefox has a neat feature where feeds can be viewed as Live Bookmarks. This means that you have your reading list, your starred items, or even any label can be one click away in the toolbar. To use this feature, use Reader to navigate to the label you want to use. Then click on the feed icon in the upper right corner and choose "Add '<your name>'s starred items" Live Bookmark". You should now have that item in the toolbar, as pictured on the left.

Reading lists for podcasts

Reader has had an inline podcast player for a while. However, one of the core attractions of podcasts is that they can be taken on the go. As a web app, Reader can't really function as a podcatcher. However, this doesn't mean that you have have two completely separate lists of subscriptions, one in Reader and one in your podcatcher.

1. Subscribe to your favorite podcasts and give them a label such as "podcast"
2. Using our sharing feature, make that label public
3. Copy that label's feed URL
4. In iTunes, select "Subscribe to Podcast..." from the "Advanced" menu and paste in the feed URL.
5. You will now have a feed that lists all your items from Reader, so you don't have to worry about keeping it up to date in iTunes.

While we used iTunes as an example, this should work with any application that supports Atom 1.0.

Labels: Better, stronger, faster Between the label selector and ability to share, labels are getting more and more useful in Reader. Today we're happy to release additional enhancements that make labels even more useful: Deletion: You can now delete labels you don't need or use anymore. Auto-completion: So that you don't have to remember if it's "friends" or "myfriends", we now provide an

Reader and the Google Personalized Homepage have always been kindred spirits, seeing as both deal with feeds (and the teams sit 10 feet apart). We're therefore very happy to announce that your Reader reading list (or any label of your choosing) can now be added as a module to the homepage. To use it, simply click on the "Add it now" button below (you'll have to be signed into your Google Account).

Here's what it looks like:

Like the regular Reader interface, the module remembers what you've read, can sort your reading list in different ways, and allows you to view items by label. Additionally, you can view items directly on the page in a nifty floating bubble. Finally, there's a few non-obvious things you can also do:

• If you add more than one instance of the module, you can tell them to display different labels, use different sorting orders, etc. It's almost like building your own Reader interface.
• You can use mouse scroll wheel (when hovering over module) to scroll the item list up and down.
• You can click the "edit" link and customize many things about the module.

P.S. Just wanted to give a shout-out to Nick Lothian, who had written an unofficial Reader homepage module much earlier on, tiding our users over. Thanks Nick!

P.P.S. If you're looking for a way to move your homepage feed modules over to Google Reader, this OPML export module comes in handy.

Here's some recent changes we've made to Reader that we thought you'd like to know about:

Reading list ordering defaults: Your reading list can be sorted in different ways (by date or "automatically", which shows you more relevant items first). Additionally, it can have read items hidden or always visible. Until this week, the default combination was to sort automatically and show read items. Unfortunately, this meant that new items did not necessarily end up at the top, which was confusing to some users. We've therefore changed the defaults to sort by date and hide read items. If you prefer a different combination, these settings can be controlled by the links at the bottom of your reading list (pictured on the right).

Related subscriptions menu: When we made the recent improvements to reading by subscription or label, we neglected one use case, which was to see a list of subscriptions that have a particular label. Based on feedback from our users, we've added a new menu, "Related subscriptions," that shows up when selecting a label or a subscription that has labels.

Starring in the mobile interface: Our mobile interface is handy for when you're on the go, but occasionally you can come across an item that you would like to re-read when you're back at your computer. Until now, the mobile interface provided no way to flag an item so you could find it later. Now all items that you read have a "Add star" link at the bottom of the page, so you can easily add it to your starred items.

Bugfixes: As usual, with each release we try to polish Reader by fixing bugs here and there. Some recent ones that we've squashed include: better Safari support on the settings page and when marking items as read, better support for non-audio enclosures and better support for relative URLs in entries.

A lot of these changes were made in response to user feedback and bug reports. The best way to make yourself heard is to post in our discussion group.