How to fix Google Reader's "oops, an error occurred..." message

Blogging is a big thing at the moment, though many of us read far more than we write. Keeping track of them can be a bit of a nightmare, dotted as they are here and there across the internet. Reader is Google's solution to that: it keeps tabs on your favourite blogs so you don't have to, grabbing new posts from each one and putting them in the same place so you can read them in a similar way to reading your emails: they come to you.

But, like everything in life, there is the odd problem. One of them is this:

In certain versions of certain browsers (my school's version of Internet Explorer is one of them; not sure about others that this issue affects), whenever you try to do much at all (I discovered it when trying to unsubscribe from a blog, but it has happened when trying to mark individual posts as read or unread, and I'm sure there are other times it happens too) an error is displayed towards the top of the page which reads "Oops... an error occurred. Please try again in a few seconds." Waiting a few seconds and trying again doesn't help.

The fix
The fix, it turns out, is an easy one!

1. Look in the address bar towards the top of your browser window
2. Where it says "http://...", just click between the 'p' and the ':' and type an 's', so now it looks like "https://..."
3. Hit return to reload the page.

Done. everything should work properly now. If it doesn't, try the steps outlined above again. If it still doesn't then I'm sorry, but you'll have to continue your search...

Good luck.