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!

Steven Bellovin, computer security professor at Columbia, posted an interesting recount of his observations on being a poll worker.