Continuing our Quick Tip series, this one deals with Google Reader and speeding up the Refresh, Mark all as read and Change folders actions. As I’ve mentioned before, I use Google Reader to aggregate new blogs posts but I’ve always been dismayed at the time it took to refresh Reader to show new posts, mark posts as read or change subscription folders. Around 15 seconds for each in my case. I’d always assumed it was because I follow over 200 blogs and Reader is slow because of this. But yesterday, I discovered that by hiding the navigation panel on the left, there’s a dramatic increase in performance. Perhaps you’ve already spotted this but if you didn’t know, you can show/hide the navigation panel by clicking the blue arrow shown below:

You’ll now just see the current folder. To navigate to other folders, just click the navigation tab which has appeared at the top left of the screen:

With the navigation panel hidden, Refresh, Mark all as read and Change folders are all down to about 2 seconds now! Hope you find this useful – if you didn’t already know about it.