A backlash is brewing against traditional thin-client web applications. Folks are tired of the beachball. Vendors of Web-based applications like Gmail, in which users spend a significant portion of their day, will respond by incorporating client-side persistence, offline operation and synchronization. In particular Gmail will add these features in 2007.

Well then a couple days ago (May 30, 2007), Google announced Google Gears , their toolkit for offline web apps (connection detection, offline operation, offline storage) and updated Reader with an offline mode. This thing is similar in purpose to Joyent’s Slingshot which went into Beta on the Mac on April 17, 2007.

It sure seems like the stage is set. Technology answers need. Only thing standing in the way might be competing priorities or strategic conflicts. Have to think about that a little bit.

I just ran across a little tool that solves the first problem in some situations. If you look in the “Goodies” tab on your Google Reader “Settings” page you’ll find a “Subscribe…” bookmarklet in the “Subscribe as you surf” section. Drag that to your bookmarks toolbar folder. When you’re on a page that indicates it’s got an RSS feed, you can click that bookmarklet and it’ll add the feed directly to Google Reader for you — no extra hop through the “Google Homepage vs. Google Reader” page required. Here, I’ve duplicated the bookmarklet for you — just use this one if you like: Subscribe…. And as usual, if you’re reading this in Google Reader the previous bookmarklet will have been neutered so you’ll need to either go to the Google Reader page just cited or toodle on over to memerocket.com for the real thing.

An issue to be aware of is that by using the bookmarklet instead of the built in (e.g. Firefox 2.0) browser subscription mechanism, if the page offers more than one feed you’re always gonna get the first — you won’t get a choice of which one to subscribe to.

On to the second issue (no streamlined way to tag the newly added feed). Well I’ve been asleep at the switch. I’ve got egg on my face. Apparently, about seven days ago, the Google Reader Engineers added a “Feed actions…” drop-down menu (upper right when you’re reading a feed) that you can use to assign tags=folders to your feed.

This last bit is the most recent refrain of a recurring theme. It goes like this: Bill finds an annoyance in a Google product, Bill goes off and does other things for a short while, Bill notices that the evil mind-reading-time-traveling Google engineers have fixed the problem. These people are scary.

PS in the process of writing this post, the theme repeated again — I noticed Google Groups got a significant facelift and now it looks a lot more like Gmail. It didn’t look that way yesterday. Hold up — this is Google Groups Beta I’m looking at. Why am I always the last to know? Those Google engineers smell different.

Well ask and ye shall receive. Drag^[1] (the following hyperlink…) Pukkadita to your bookmark toolbar and then click it from any page. Like the vanilla Pukka bookmarklet, this one uses the current page title, location (URL) and selection (if any) to initialize the fields of a new del.icio.us entry via Pukka. Like Gordita, though, this one is aware of Google Reader’s unique DOM structure so if you’re on the Google Reader page you get a reference to the current item (not the page itself).

Pukka enhancing del.icio.us tagging on your Mac, tweaked by Pukkadita to integrate seamlessly with Google Reader. Little tools working together to keep you focused. I like that!

[1] If you’re reading this in Google Reader, the Pukkadita bookmarklet (hyperlink) above has been neutered. It won’t work. To get a working one, navigate to the article on memerocket.com and drag your Pukkadita from there.

1. When I click a subscription link, rather than have the subscription go directly to Google Reader, I’m presented with an intermediate page that asks me my preferred destination: Google Homepage vs. Google Reader. Every… Single…Time
2. After selecting “add to Google Reader” at that screen, I’m taken to the subscription in Google reader (good!) but there is no effecient way to tag the new feed. The first thing I always want to do is tag that new feed and I can’t do it. Google Reader taunts me with the per-item “Edit tags:” control — but for some impenetrable reason, a tag applied that way pertains only to a single item — not the feed itself. Never mind that you can never navigate back to an item w/ this sort of fine-grained tag.

In order to tag the newly added feed, my approach is to navigate to the “Manage subscriptions…” page; command-f (find) the feed of interest; click the “Change folders…” drop-down and apply my tags. Sheesh. There has to be a better way.

What you’d like is a key combo that’ll switch from the current Firefox window to the one that just opened behind it. Unlike the PC where all windows are created equal and alt-tab will cycle between them, on the Mac command-tab cycles between applications. If an application has multiple windows open, only the focus window can be switched to with command-tab.

Turns out you can use command-` — that’s command-backquote on OS X to cycle between windows of the current application. When your Gordita pops up the del.icio.us window behind the focus window, hit command-` and assuming you had no other Firefox windows open, it’ll cycle your little del.icio.us window to the top.

I hope this is sufficient to dissuade Blake Burris and others from fiddling w/ Minefield. I tried that thing and I do not recommend going there. Most extensions don’t work and it has other odd bugs.

Google Reader is the greatest, except when it’s not. Take shared items for instance. It’s convenient to simply click the share control while reading an item and to have that item show up on your very own private feed. Distribute the secret feed URL to your friends, syndicate it on your blog, isn’t it peachy!

But what if you are reading an item in Google Reader and you decide delve a bit deeper — navigating onto a blog, or some other site. Now let’s say you find something really cool that you’d like to add to your Google Reader shared items feed. Well you can’t do it — you’re not inside the Google Reader application any more and Google has exposed no external means of adding items to that feed.

But hold on… isn’t del.icio.us really good at this stuff? It’s all about bookmarks and tagging and open RESTy web services. There are a number of applications integrated with del.icio.us including Pukka, Ryan Tomayko’s del.icio.us addresslets, and numerous bookmarklet generators from Ryan and others.

These tools are great for general purpose tagging. The problem is they aren’t integrated with Google Reader. Click your generated bookmarklet while reading an item in Google Reader and you’ll create a tag to Google Reader itself — not the item you’re reading.

To address the lack of Google Reader integration, I’ve created yet another bookmarklet generator. This one generates a Google Reader Del.icio.us Tagging bookmarklet — a Gordita. Click the bookmarklet while you’re reading an item in Google Reader and you’ll tag the current item (using Google Reader’s meta-data). Click the bookmarklet while reading some other site (other than Google Reader) and it works as you’d expect — using the current location and page title for the tag metadata. Enter your del.icio.us username in this form and click the “New Gordita” button. A window will pop up, containing a hyperlink. Drag that hyperlink to your browser’s menu bar and then click that thing when you want to tag an item in Google Reader or just tag any old page. Oh, and in either situation — your current selection gets injected into the notes field of your new entry. (I used the code generated by Ryan Tomayko’s experimental-delicious-thing-generator as a starting point — thanks Ryan!)

del.icio.us username:
PS If you’re running Firefox 2.0 you’ll notice (or not!) that Gordita, and in fact most windows opened by bookmarklets are opening behind the focus window — instead of on top where you’d like ‘em. The problem is documented in bugzilla bug 232605 and I’ve verified that the Firefox nightly (burning edge) actually fixes this problem as of 11/4/2006.

PPS The Mac workaround for the Firefox 2.0 bug is to use command-` that’s command-backquote to cycle to the newly opened window. Windows folks can use alt-tab.

Update: September 25, 2007
In response to John’s feedback I’ve tweaked the bookmarket (generator) so that Gordita no longer gives “undefined” as the subject. Let me know if you have any more problems.