Go Offline with Google Reader

It has been a long time since I gave up my offline RSS reader. I loved the google reader interface and it's usability since it was in public beta. Only disadvantage about using it was that I had to be online to read any RSS feed, which hard was a problem for me.

I have been extremely busy these days due to an extended us trip and some deadlines to be met. Thus did not log in to the google reader for the last few weeks, until this evening after finishing my work. The first thing got my attention was a link in the top right hand corner which said offline. That was something I saw there for the first time. I was thinking may be they have written a stand-alone application to complement the web UI. Anyhow, I just clicked on it to check what it is and there I got the surprise of the month for sure.

Now you can save the latest 2000 items to your machine so that you can read them offline. 2000 is a decent amount I guess. This feature has been introduced to google reader only a week ago on the 31st May. It uses the recently released google gears, a browser plugin which enables writing offline web applications. It should rather be called a toolkit than a browser plugin. The official google reader blog says:

To do this, we've used the newly released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection. To get started, simply click the "Offline" link in the top right of Google Reader.

Here is my google reader gone offline, yay!