customize google reader to use the screen width

Google Reader is the probably the chosen RSS reader for many of you. One of the issues for me while using a wide-screen monitor was that the text in the post would never stretch to make use of the wide monitor that is available. It pretty much uses around 650 pixels before word wrapping. This is especially annoying if you have a 1920 pixel resolution or more. And actually, it is very easy to fix this using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) in most browsers.

The CSS that you need to add is just this one small piece of code

.item-body, .entry-body {
width:96% !important;
max-width:98% !important;
}

If your Google Reader looked like this before

Google Reader Before

It should look like this after inserting the CSS style

Google Reader After

Feel free to play around with the size values in the code to suite your monitor and screen size.

You will need to add this to your user style sheet of the browser or use the Stylish extension for your browser. Check out how to use a custom stylesheet in a browser if you like more information on how to do it.