Will Richardson

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"M" for, um…"Unread"

April 28, 2008 By Will Richardson

Before I pull myself the last couple of steps up from my recent blogging funk, a quick item from the “Things I Wished I’d Known for the Last Two Years Department.” My major, major, major frustration with Google Reader has always been what I thought was the inability for me to mark a post “unread.” As with my practice in Firefox when I leave like 87 tabs open, by work flow is such that I just like to keep alive all the potentially good stuff I scan through when I don’t really have time to read it. The “Add a Star” feature in Reader has never done the job, and I have been staring at the stupid “Mark as Read” button (which I have never understood the purpose of) wishing I could turn it into “Mark as UNread.” No amount of staring helped.

So today, I find out all you have to do is hit the “M” key on a post to keep it active in Google Reader. I know, I know…I should have spent more time on the shortcuts page.

Not sure what it says that my life suddenly feels a whole bunch better right now. Sad, I know.

Filed Under: RSS, Tools Tagged With: Google_Reader, RSS

Comments

  1. Ann Oro says

    April 28, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    You’re the man! I guess sometimes it pays to read directions or the shortcuts page, in this case. Starring items is a great idea, but I still haven’t taken the time to go back to my starred items yet – maybe this summer. In the meanwhile, I’ll be hitting that M key.
    Ann

  2. Ryan Bretag says

    April 28, 2008 at 10:05 pm

    That M is a shortcut for unchecking Mark as Read which you can do by just clicking on it 🙂

  3. Dave says

    April 29, 2008 at 11:47 am

    You’re not alone! For some reason, it took me months and months to identify the symbol next to “Mark as Read” as a checked checkbox that I could uncheck.

  4. Chad L. says

    May 10, 2008 at 11:13 pm

    I’ve been using Google Reader for a while and never knew about that trick – thanks!

  5. Matt says

    May 14, 2008 at 2:33 pm

    Interestingly enough, I recently noticed that the “Mark as Read” box has been changed to a “Keep Unread” box (pressing “M” still works), which makes the whole process a bit clearer and intuitive.

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