I downloaded the Better GReader Firefox extension for Google Reader from Lifehacker yesterday, and I like the Smart Subscribe option very much.

What it does is add a little icon or image in the top right hand corner of a webpage that has a RSS feed, and if you want to subscribe to the feed, you just have to click on the icon and it takes you straight to your Google Reader, instead of to the splash page that Google normally sends you to, where you have to then choose between iGoogle and Google Reader.

That’s very convenient, but it’s actually not what I like best about it. What I really love is when I’m on a webpage, if I’m already subscribed to the RSS feed, there’s this nice big checkmark through the icon in the upper right hand corner.

I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted subscribing to a feed only to discover that I was already subscribed to it. Since I have so many different blog projects on the go, I have a ton of feeds to manage, and it’s not that rare for me not to remember a site I’ve already been to and subscribed. (This assumes, of course, that you’re already logged into Google Reader. I’m always logged into Google Reader.)

I ended up turning off the optimized skin option of the extension, because it rendered the left hand column too narrow for me to read enough of my feed names to know which they were. It also placed the “edit tag” input box halfway off my screen, so that I couldn’t enter a new tag unless I deleted the existing tag - and I couldn’t see any new tags I input in their entirety, since I could only see about four or five characters into the input box.

Since I don’t use the keyboard short-cuts, I didn’t give the Quick Links option a whirl.

Overall, I’m quite happy with this extension. It will shave some time off my blogging day, that’s for sure.