Speed Up Long Post Load-Times in Google Reader

Midterm week is upon us here at Cooper, so there hasn’t been time between studying for one class to working on projects for another, to sit down and write up another post. However, I keep a small list of bloggable items in my Google Notebook that I already want to talk about. So digging into my rainy-day jar of blogging ideas, I want to remind you of a simple Google Reader setting that might be more useful than you think.

If you’re a photoshopper of any caliber, whether professional, hobbyist, or just a small-time tweaker like me, you’re probably going to have a folder dedicated to various photoshop tutorial blogs, such as PSHERO or PSDTuts. All posts on these blogs are bound to be LONG, consisting of many not-so-small images, and perhaps other components such as youtube videos. In fact, the better a tutorial is, the more detailed and explained the steps are. This holds true for any other blog, as well as Lifehacker, or Smashing Magazine.

Loading a feed like this onto Google Reader and having them all open at the same time will load all the posts at the same time, slowing your internet down tremendously. But all of this can have a simple solution: List View. The default view in Reader is the Expanded View, which is great for 80% of feeds, like Slashdot, where posts are short and concise. However, for very verbose and object-heavy posts, it takes a load off of your bandwidth to load only one page at a time. So next time you’re waiting for the images on your tutorial to load, just switch to List View and enjoy the speed. The improvement might vary from blog to blog, and connection to connection, but I have definetely noticed an improvement, and hope you all do too!

• google
• Performance