If the high unread item counts in Google Reader are making browsing your feeds feel more like a chore than relaxed browsing, hide them using the Remove Unread Count user style, for use with the Stylish or Greasemonkey extension. The style hides all individual subscription and folder unread counts—only the count in the title bar remains—and developer says he built it to get rid of Reader guilt.

Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds.

The Google Reader Blog offers up one enthusiast's handy technique for using RSS feeds to keep track of recipe ideas. Ann Verbin, a dedicated reader of cooking blogs, using Google Reader's stars to identify recipe ideas she likes, then tags them with meal categories and key ingredients so she can easily find new meal ideas. She also uses "cooked" and "cooked-good" tags While you could just star items and then use Reader's general search, the discipline of tagging helps find ideas "when you don't have anything too specific in mind", Verbin writes.

The developer responsible for the user script that integrates Calendar and Reader into your Gmail has updated his script to do a few key things: collapse your inbox for easy calendar and feed browsing, and work with Google Apps accounts. Unlike the Gmail Labs gadget which adds your agenda to the sidebar, this script gives you full calendar access below your inbox. Here's where you can get the latest version, called Gmail with Collapsible & Minimalist Inbox plus Google Calendar, Reader, Notebook, etc. The user script requires Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension installed to run. Thanks, Michael!

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Click on the "Show Details" link at the top of any feed inside Google Reader, and you'll get a bar chart of how often new posts arrive, and how many you read—this is in addition to the overall subscription information you can get by hitting the Trends link on the top of the left sidebar.

Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension: Not since Gmail saw its interface overhaul last October has a scripter embedded Google Calendar and Reader into Gmail easily—until now. Two new user scripts integrate both Google Calendar and Google Reader onto the same screen as your email inbox. Here's what it looks like.

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Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension: You're cruising through your unread items in Google Reader, and suddenly you want to mark all the items AFTER your current one as read, or BEFORE your current one as read—but not all of them. The Mark Until Current As Read Greasemonkey user script can do just that. With it installed, press Ctrl+Y to mark items before the one you're looking at as read, and Ctrl+I to mark items after as read—a nice feature for power GReader users. The Mark Until Current As Read user script is a free download, works with Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension, and is currently on deck to be included in the Better GReader extension. Thanks, CliffordBadger!

TechCrunch reports that web-based feedreader Bloglines has stopped pulling in updates for "thousands of blogs" with no word from its parent company, Ask.com, about what's going on. We made the switch from Bloglines to Google Reader two years ago. How about you?

Google Reader adds a few minor features today: sharing and friends features in all non-English languages, the ability to add tags when you add notes to an item, and my personal favourite, the ability to auto-sort a folder of subscriptions either alphabetically or in "My Order" (by regular drag and drop). Hit the Options link on the bottom left to reorder your subscriptions.

JavaScripter Parand Tony Darugar wanted an easy way to scroll through a long page with large images on it. Though the ScrollMonkey Greasemonkey user script can do it, to avoid installing an add-on he put together a ReaderScroll bookmarklet. Drag and drop the bookmarklet onto your toolbar in any browser, then if you hit a page with lots of images, click it. Daruger explains:

The script does a very simple thing - it brings the next image to the top of the browser window so you can see it. You hit "j" to see the following image and "k" to go back to the previous.

Here's a good example page of Olympics photos to try it out on. For more bookmarklet goodness, check out our top 10 useful bookmarklets.