Last year two services launched, giving bloggers easy access to threaded comments, spam control, avatars, and other advanced features. Disqus and Intense Debate also let you create a single profile which you can use to leave comments on any participating blog or web site. No need to register for each individual blog.

And since last year, thousands of web sites have adopted these two commenting systems. Considering there are millions of blogs out there, that's just a drop in the bucket. But every filled bucket starts with a single drop. Or something like that. Anyway, if any of the blogs you follow use Disqus, gReader Comments is a pretty nifty Firefox plugin that will let you see comments in Google Reader without clicking through to the blog.

Once you install gReader Comments, you should notice a new box in your Google Reader post windows that says Comments. Click on this box and a Disqus window will pop up showing you the comments left on the post and offering you the chance to leave your own comments.

The plugin still needs some work. We tested it with Firefox 2.0.0.14 and Firefox 3 beta 5, and in both browsers gReader Comments failed to accurately show how many comments each post had. At first it would show no comments, and then when you click the box on a post that actually has, say 3 comments, all the boxes may say 3 comments whether here are actually comments or not. But with a little more work, this could be an extraordinarily useful plugin for anyone who spends most of their time online in Google Reader.

[via A VC]

For a long time now, Google Reader has sat in the camp with other online RSS clients who unfortunately don't (or more correctly: couldn't) report the number of readers subscribed to a feed. This of course can frustrate publishers, as they only see one collective hit from Google Reader instead of an actual number of their readers using that client.

As of this morning, however, the Official Google Reader Blog has changed all of that. In fact, the gReader team has not only enabled their crawler to report an actual number of feed subscribers, that number also includes users who are simply subscribed to a feed via Google Homepage.

Not content to stop at mere numbers, the Google Reader team have also created a Tips for Publishers page that offers ideas for best practices, feed implementation, feed "auto-discovery" and even a few catches to look out for.

It might not have been the much-requested search update that gReader users are salivating for, but these new features should certainly put a smile on most publishers' faces.

Continuing the buzz surrounding the new Google Reader, 3rd party Greasemonkey scripts are cropping up that either modify or add much-requested features (like integrating it with Gmail). At the top of this request list (or at least near it) is search - after all, it is a Google product. Unfortunately, the Reader team's own Mihai Parparita has explained in the product's Google Group that search is a bit tricky right now - but they're working on it.

While you wait though, why not add at least some basic search functionality with this Greasemonkey script? Be warned though, as by 'basic' I mean 'it can only search a single feed you're reading, or all blogs across the blogosphere, via Google's Blog Search.' For now, it can't search multiple blogs (a limit of the Blog Search engine itself) or folders of feeds in Reader, but hey - it's a start. On the plus side, the author is open to suggestions if anyone knows of an engine better suited to the task of searching multiple sites at once, so throw your two cents in if you want to make the only Google Reader search that much better.

Google Reader has received a major UI overhaul and joined its sibling Google apps with the introduction of a full-blown "Settings" page. Users finally have a powerful management panel for their Subscriptions and Labels, allowing batch operations for deleting, renaming and shuffling subscriptions around. The Google Reader team even went so far as to allow you to toggle whether animations play when you're using gReader.


The face lift doesn't stop at Google Reader's settings and preferences though. There is a new Labels menu to accompany Subscriptions, and both are ripe with AJAX-y pull-down goodness. Gone is that clunky Subscriptions section that folds out; now they're both handy menus that allow you to chose single feeds or entire labels. But if you aren't a menu and mousing kind of reader, the translucent label selector you can access from a keyboard shortcut (g + l) is still present.

All in all this is a spectacular (and necessary) update to my personal favorite of the online newsreader offerings. Call me crazy, but I think this finally makes Google Reader feel like it has the necessary features to stack up to the competition - even though it's still in the Labs.