Feedly continues to improve its offering with a new skin
The past week or so has been a whirlwind for Google Reader fans -- which seem to be much more numerous than Google led us to believe when it announced that the service would be killed on July 1 due to lack of usage. Recently Ghacks took a look at a number of alternatives for the disenfranchised users to move their feeds to.
One of the most prominent on the list, and the one that many angry customers seem to be turning towards is Feedly. The service has something to recommend it -- it works in the web browser just as Reader did and it has a more modern looking user interface. My only problem with moving to Feedly has been the layout of that interface. I may be old-fashioned, but I miss the simple Reader look.
Fortunately, Feedly can by customized with user scripts in much the same way that browser and web sites like YouTube can be.
Today Feedly announced a new script that changes the look of the service in a number of ways. In a brief post to its blog, the company took the time to say "here is a user script to make Feedly more useful for people who need a list view with full width". The compact list view is exactly what I had been missing with this service.
The script, called Readly, was posted to the UserScripts.org repository. It essentially makes Feedly resemble Google Reader, including a more compact layout, full-width screen, no more caps, grey title color for read items, favicons, visual fixes and more. Note that Martin has mentioned the script a couple of days ago already in his optimize Feedly for speed guide.
Chrome users will need to enable the Tampermonkey extension, while those of you using the Firefox web browser must install Greasemonkey -- both are script engines that allows these changes to be made. Once that is done, and you have installed the Readly script, then make sure Feedly is set to "Titles" view and the "Modern Gray" theme -- both should be default.
Conclusion
After briefly checking out Feedly in the wake of the Google Reader news, I was turned off, mostly because it was simply unfamiliar. I then signed up for The Old Reader where, after five days, I remain int eh Queue waiting for my OPML file to be imported -- I was moved from 47,000 to 7,000 so far.
However, with the Readly script, I may not have to wait for that replacement. Readly makes Feedly suddenly very familiar and usable to me.
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The problem with Feedly is that the simplicity of adding a new feed in Google Reader is totally gone.
It is so difficult that for the time being, unless it gets fixed – many people have complained, I will have to use something else.
well jully is still in a lot of month ^^
To me, Feedly is best Reader alternative. However, I cannot use it at work because I’m tied to using IE9 :(
I wish they (Feedly) will offer a web-based access.
Yeah that is definitely a missing feature.
From the title I thought that Feedly released a new UI.
Actually its a third party script.
Ohh suuure, let the scripters take all the credit. We poor userstyle users will just keep trucking on!
userstyles with stylish are the better option for this kind of change
I know this is just me, but I don’t see the big deal. These are the risks of a company that creates a lot of free-to-use, non-monetized products, aren’t they? And, I’ve always used Liferea in desktop, so… Thanks very much for this tip, though. I hope Feedly doesn’t give up soon!