Share Your Reading Habits: Google Reader
Part of developing a successful blog and your identity as a blogger is creating a web of blogs that you read and participate in. Imagine the blogosphere as a giant web. You want to connect your website to a bunch of others - you don’t want to just be a random thread connected to nothing.
Google Reader provides you with a nifty tool to help you do this. With the “Share” feature of Google Reader, you can easily syndicate a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.
Get a Google Account: Start Reading
If you don’t use Google Reader - or another feed reader - start using one. Until you use RSS feeds on a daily basis, you’ll never know how wonderful they are, and you’ll never know how much your readers may come to rely on them.
Once I decide I like a site, I generally read it through Google Reader. If an article is interesting, I’ll click through to the site and comment on it. Other than that, I rarely go back to the site. Without the RSS reader, I’d probably never return to the site at all.
An RSS reader is a great way to collect relevant readings into one location - so you can sit there with your cup of coffee and read all of the new stuff out in the blogosphere. You can then decide what is important enough to comment on (on someone else’s blog) or respond to (on your own blog).
Share Items - Creating Your Own Feed
With Google Reader, there is a cool “Share” feature. At the bottom of the article you are reading, there’s a list of options - “Add Star,” “Share,” “E-mail,” and “Mark as Read.”
By choosing the “Share” option you are adding that article to a publicly viewable list. That list also generates its own RSS feed - which makes it easy for you to syndicate the feed on your own site. By doing so, you provide your readers with a list of articles that you recently read and found interesting.
It’s a more targeted and stable than a standard RSS feed that just shows every headline from a given website - which will hopefully make it more useful for your readers.
Grab the Widget, Style Yourself
This feed is available in a standard rss xml file. You could use SimpleXML to parse the feed and display the information yourself. Or, you could use the ready-made widget that Google provides.
The Google widget uses Javascript to access the information while your page is loading. This potentially stops your page from hanging if the Google server is not responding - the rest of the page can load while the RSS feed is updated. You can find this widget by clicking on the “Your shared items” link in Google Reader and clicking on the “put a clip of your shared items” link.
The only problem is that the pre-designed styles don’t offer you a lot of options for making the list blend in with your site’s theme. My suggestion would be to select “None,” for the color scheme. You may also want to leave the title blank, and add your own title to the feed.
If you do this, the feed will be generated with the following HTML. Note: This example uses the “Show item sources” option.
<div id="readerpublishermodule0" class="reader-publisher-module"> <ul> <li> <a class="i" title="Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids" href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/good-for-hunters-bad-for-druids/">Good for Hunters, Bad for Druids</a> <div class="s">from <a href="http://4thehorde.wordpress.com">For the Horde</a></div> </li> <li> <a class="i" title="Bornakk: Druids Not to be "Big Green Blobs"" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/%7Er/Resto4Life/%7E3/279629927/">Bornakk: Druids Not to be "Big Green Blobs"</a> <div class="s">from <a href="http://www.resto4life.com">Resto4Life</a></div> </li> </ul> <div class="f"><a href="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/18391951200330501918/state/com.google/broadcast">Read more...</a></div> </div>
By taking a look at this example HTML, you can easily style the widget yourself.
The entire thing is contained in a div with class “reader-publisher-module.” Each headline is contained within its own “li.” If you use the option to display the source of the article, it’s in a div with class “s” inside the list item.
My one gripe with Google Reader is I can’t create multiple shared lists. For example, I’ve divided blogs I read into ones related to web development and ones related to World of Warcraft. I’d love to be able to create a shared article list for each topic, so that I can syndicate each one on a different website.
If you want to see this in action, check out my World of Warcraft blog, Rolling Horde. It’s on the right hand side, in the middle column, underneath the recent articles.
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