There have been sporadic reports that Google Reader does not display content sometimes. For me, this is chronic, but I haven’t isolated the cause yet. There is a work around that I haven’t seen discussed: the page displays properly with the sidebar expanded. When the page renders empty, there is not a lot of hint that it can be expanded.

Here is how Reader renders initially for me:

Hovering over the left edge of the page reveals the sidebar expansion tab:

And expanding the sidebar immediately reveals the content of the page:

I haven’t dug into Firebug to see why this is the case yet, but it should be fixable with a Stylish or Greasemonkey script, I’d imagine.

Update: Mihai from the Google Reader team provides this work around in the comments: “The ‘blank screen’ problem seems to be caused by a negative page zoom value (while the screen is blank, you can try going to to the View menu, and in the Zoom submenu choose Reset).” Thanks Mihai!