If you use Google Reader as your RSS reader of choice, you may have wished that you could have more control over how it displays things. Luckily, with the use of Firefox and a couple Greasemonkey scripts, you have a few options for tweaking its behavior.

First, I recommend you install Better GReader. This Firefox add-on allows you to use different “skins,” which can improve the use of screen real estate. It also has some additional niceties such as displaying feed favicons and allowing you to preview the item within Google Reader before actually visiting the site it came from.

Second, if you have Greasemonkey installed, I highly recommend the Google Reader Filter user script. It can highlight or exclude feed items based on keywords you provide. It can also filter out duplicate items, which can be a huge time-saver.

I have made some changes to the Google Reader Filter because it didn’t work exactly like I wanted. It wouldn’t highlight or exclude items that had already been read, which I found annoying, and it would only search the title of the feed item for keywords, not the whole feed item. So, with my changes, it now highlights and excludes regardless of whether the item has been read or where in the feed item the keyword appears. If you are interested in my code, leave a comment and I’ll post it on the site.