After trying one method of bringing my shared Google Reader items into Wordpress I’m not exactly thrilled with the results. Rather than creating a single post per shared item I think I’d be happier with rolling a week’s worth of items into a single “roundup” post. The things I share aren’t really meant to spark discussion, they’re just good reads I want to share.
What I really want to be able to do is create a post with a list of links to the items that have been shared since my last update (much like Kurtis does occasionally with random links). Problem is I can’t find a plugin that does this so it looks like I’ll be putting my noob PHP skills to use to create another plugin. Naming it is going to be the hardest part, “Feed Link Extractor” or “Feed Link Aggregator” or something.
Tagged with: google reader, rss, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
You might be wondering what these “Shared” posts are. Most of my web surfing consists of reading my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, all 146 of them. On a given day I might find one or two things that I think other people would want to read. Google Reader lets you share items with your “friends”, but there’s no way to have a discussion about the content.
A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those “shared” items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have Wordpress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.
Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn’t an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.
So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I’d love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.
Tagged with: blogging, google reader, internet, plugin, rss, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Just realized you don’t have to subscribe to a feed in Google Reader to share something you find on the Internet. Under “Your Stuff” they added “Notes” a while back. On that page there’s a bookmark you can drag to the bookmark toolbar, click it, add a note and share the note in your Shared items. Highlight text on the page and it will prepopulate the description field with it. If you can’t see my shared items, send me a chat invitation in Gmail; pretty sure that’s the only way to become “friends” in Google Reader. Added a test note of a chart from Ross Perot’s perotcharts.com.
Tagged with: gmail, google reader, internet, rss
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I’m impressed, I couldn’t keep up with everyone’s blog posts and comments and ended up with a good list of about 80 items to go through from the past 3 days. Got busy upgrading my computer and getting ready to build a media server/HTPC. With so much activity it is definitely important to use an RSS reader like Google Reader which I outlined here.
Tagged with: blogging, rss
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I’ve made a post about Really Simple Syndication (RSS) in the past and alluded to it elsewhere, but I never really went into the details of the best way to adopt this very simple technology (no pun intended). In a nutshell RSS let’s subscribe to all your favorite blogs and websites and have all the posts and content show up in one easy to access place. I’ve got about 40 blogs and sites that I frequent, imagine how long it would take to go through and check everyday for new content; I sure don’t have that kind of time. That’s where RSS and Google Reader comes in.
I’m going to use Google Reader as a platform for this post but the post will still be helpful to those using a program that supports OPML. I’m a big fan of Gmail which led me to be a big fan of Google Reader. I’ve done all the work of compiling a list of feeds that includes all of our blogs and their comments; you get to reap the benefits. All you will have to do is create an account with Google (if you don’t have one) and then upload the XML file below.
- Save this XML file to your computer by right-clicking and hitting “Save As…”
- Create your Google Account here
- Log into Google Reader
- Click “Settings” in the top right
- Click the “Import/Export” tab
- Browse for the file you saved in Step 1 and hit Upload
- Go Back to Google Reader and browse everyone’s posts and comments
I tried to get everyone in there so if there’s someone missing let me know and I’ll update the file.
And if you want to add your friend’s blogs here’s how to get their comment feeds since they usually aren’t linked:
- Blogger: http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/
- Wordpress: http://blogurl/feeds/comments/default
Got other feeds for sites you like? Post em up and share with everyone else. One of my favorites is I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?, hit “Add Subscription” in Google Reader and paste in this link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ICanHasCheezburger
Tagged with: google, rss
Posted under: Geek Stuff
