Google Reader – Renaming Folders

Fresh from subscribing to a few WordPress related blogs by some of the people I met at WordCamp Malaysia, I decided I wanted to change the folder name into which I had added these feeds, a small change from “word-press-related” to a more straight-forward “WordPress”.

After a few minutes of looking at the options in the folder settings dropdown, “Settings > Folders and Tags”, and “Settings > Subscriptions”, I realised that there didn’t appear to be any way to actually rename a folder in Google Reader. Something which is a little odd, especially seeing as it’s a piece of cake to rename a subscription. You would think this functionality would be a simple thing to implement.

Anyway, after giving up on being able to rename the folder, I worked out what is probably the fastest way to reach the same result.

  1. Pick one of your subscriptions in the folder which you wish to rename, and add it to a ‘new folder’. Give the new folder the name you desire.
  2. Go to Settings > Subscriptions, and in the “Filter by name, folder, or URL” box type the name of the old folder. This will filter your results to show only subscriptions from the old folder.
  3. Click the “Select all X subscriptions” link in the top left and the in the “More actions” drop down, select the new folder you just created.
  4. Finally, head over to “Settings >Folders and Tags”, select the old folder and click “Delete selected”.

It’s a quite a few steps for such a simple task, and it’s made even more roundabout by being unable to create a new folder from the “more actions” dropdown in “Settings > Subscriptions”, but still, now I have a folder displaying the WordPress name with its proper capitalisation, along with a whole set of new feeds for my viewing pleasure.

Those feeds, in case you’re interested:

Google Reader Icon created by jvstin on DeviantArt

Update

It looks like this post is now redundant! The Google Reader team just announced that you can now rename subscriptions.

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2010/06/folder-and-tag-renaming.html

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