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Google Reader – Mark Until Current As Read

I am an ardent feed consumer. I easily have over 300 feeds in my Google Reader and read them whenever I get a chance. The feeds include technology blogs, photography blogs, local news, startup blogs, blogs by famous people, blogs that help me in my projects etc.

It’s just not possible for me to visit every feed category every day, so I frequently see some of these categories overflow with posts.

Now I know there are extensive blog posts which describe how to better manage feeds and to cut down on information overload. But as we all know there is no simple solution.

So here I was using Google Reader and just skimming through the posts when I came across this need.

Suppose a feed has about 100 unread posts and I have skimmed through half of them, and read one in between that I thought was interesting, I am now left with quite a few posts on top of my read post, that I am not interested in reading but want to mark them as read so I don’t need to see them again. Would it be possible to mark these as read leaving the rest untouched?

The recent changes to Google Reader provide one option – Mark all entries older than a day, week or month as read. But this does not exactly serve the purpose.

I ended up hacking a Greasemonkey script to do exactly what I wanted.

Here is how the script behaves:

Just press Ctrl+Alt+Y and the script will mark all entries above the current read entry as ‘read’. Ctrl+Alt+I will mark all entries below the current entry as read – for people who read backwards. 🙂

Added benefits:

  • This also works with search results in Google Reader.
  • The script works with entire folders, so you can skim through all posts in a folder marking the ones you have skimmed as read.

How it works:
The script uses the css class names to determine which posts are unread above (or below) the current post. Once it obtains this list, it simulates a click on each of these posts and thereby marks them as read. Simple as that!

This script is part of the Better GReader extension and has featured in Lifehacker.

In order to install the Google Reader – Mark Until Current As Read script, visit this site.