Greasemonkey script for Firefox for removing duplicate posts in Google Reader.

AskMe I'm going to get right to the point:

Greasemonkey script for Firefox for removing duplicate posts in Google Reader.

This has been something of a holy grail for me. Life's fully of tiny annoyances, most of which are born out of our natural expectation of order. One of my minor, irrational annoyances is in subscribing to different RSS feeds from the same website and then for the same content or post to appear in all of them for various reasons and then having to plough through them when there's already enough writing to get through.

It's particularly annoying with The Guardian's feeds because they're often given different titles tailored to the section of the website they're on and sometimes it's not until you're actually reading the thing that you realise that you've been there before.

Like I said, minor, irrational annoyances.

I asked Metafilter for some ideas, linking to a Greasemonkey script which used to solve the problem until Google made some cosmetic changes to Reader and broke it.

One user, Michael, suggested I email the original author of the script, but if I didn't get a reply I could contact him and he'd cook something up. I didn't get a reply so I emailed him. He modified the script and after some backwards and forwards with him being very generous with his time and me explaining what I thought it should do and also that he really shouldn't be spending so much time on it, he not only repaired that original script but made it better, made it work.

Needless to say, I'm very impressed. Which is why I'm writing about it.

Michael describes the challenges in his post, as well as how to use it. There is one caveat and it's quite a big one:

"All messages to be checked for duplicates must be loaded in the viewer. If they are not loaded, they will not be checked."

In other words, you have to select 'list mode' on the folder you're interested in then hold onto the page down key until all of the posts have loaded before pressing the new button. But it's quite exciting watching the item count go down knowing that you'll be reading whatever's disappearing anyway.

Thanks Michael.

Now if only I could get someone to sort out the cd boxes with clips so tight you feel as though you could snap the disc in two when you try and remove them.