Google News Reader, Read Custom News In Chrome

Computer users have many options when it comes to reading news. From the traditional way of visiting portal sites like Yahoo or newspaper websites like the New York Times site, to aggregators like Reddit or Hacker News, to forums or RSS.

Google News is an aggregator that is collecting news articles from around the world to make them available as excerpts with links pointing to the source. Not every website is included into Google News as sites need to meet certain standards for a chance to be included into the Google News program. The benefit for site owners is that Google News can drive extra traffic – that is usually time-limited – to websites included in the program.

Google News Reader for the Google Chrome browser is an official extension that can display news in the browser directly.? The extension adds a single icon to Chrome’s address bar that you can click on to display news headlines.

Before you do that, you may want to open the preferences first to select topics that you are interested in. A right-click on the icon and the selection of options from the context menu opens the configuration screen.

It allows you to..

change the target country for the news. A click on the pulldown menu displays dozens of countries that are supported besides the U.S. If you want localized news, this is the setting you need to modify.change the number of stories from five to a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 10.enable or disable popular topics, including national, sports or technological news.define up to 10 custom news topics that you are interested in

Google News Reader displays only one topic at a time in the news listing, which means that you may need to switch quite a bit depending on the number of topics that you monitor.

You can click on a topic to expand it in the popup, which displays an excerpt, additional news sources, and links pointing to those sources.

A click on a link opens the website the news was published on. The extension could use some polishing, for instance options to change font sizes, or a larger popup window that displays more news at once. Some users have also criticized Google for not synchronizing the setup with their custom Google account news setup. It is despite that a popular Chrome extension.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday May 24, 2012 -
Tags:google chrome extensions, google news

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Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on for Chrome

Many websites and services make use of Google Analytics, a web statistics service that is tracking web users on websites where the script is installed. Besides the tracking, there is also the aspect of loading times that are affected by the script. Web users who do not want to be tracked, or want sites to load faster, may want to consider blocking the Google Analytics script from running on sites they visit.

Firefox users can use the excellent NoScript add-on for that, which takes care of both issues. Chrome users can install comparable solutions like NotScript or ScriptNo. Some may however feel that they interfere to much with day-to-day web browsing.

The Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on for the Chrome browser may not be the perfect solution, as it only tackles the tracking problem but not the loading of the script itself, but it does not interfere with other scripts running on the site. The Chrome extension has been created by Google, which may be the reason why the script is not blocked outright. According to information posted on the Chrome Web Store, the add-on “communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics”.

It basically means that the script is loaded, and that the add-on notifies the script that the visit should not be tracked.

Another solution that is working universally on the system would be to block Google Analytics in the hosts file. Simply add the following two lines to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com

On Windows, the hosts file is located in the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc directory. Just open it in a plain text editor like Notepad, and add the two rows to the end of it. This basically redirects requests that websites make to Google Analytics servers to the local system where the script can’t be found. Webmasters should keep in mind that this may prevent them from accessing the Google Analytics website.

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About the Author:Martin Brinkmann is a journalist from Germany who founded Ghacks Technology News Back in 2005. He is passionate about all things tech and knows the Internet and computers like the back of his hand. You can follow Martin on Facebook or Twitter.Author: Martin Brinkmann, Friday May 25, 2012 -
Tags:google analytics, google chrome extensions

You are here: Home ? Browsing ? Google Analytics Opt-out Add-on for Chrome

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