Google Reader

Reader’s the center of all my information consumption, but previously wasn’t so good at letting you share that information. If you wanted to bookmark something, or share a cool article with a friend, your options were limited. You’d either star an item, and then come back to it later, or you’d share it – but then only other Google Reader users could see it, and then that was only if you were friends on Google Reader. Which I have, like, three of.

But Google, always in sync with my needs (we have a wonderful and functional relationship, Google and I), has just released a “Send To” feature for Reader. Send To lets you share an article via Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, (though those are sort of the same now, huh?) Digg, Posterous, and many more.

To set this up, open Reader. At the top right of the page, click “Settings.” You’ll then see a tab in Settings called “Send To.” Click it. Then, select the service or services you want to add to your Send To… menu in Reader.

The list is long, but you’re not limited to it. With a bit of know-how, you can create a custom link that’ll let you send the Reader item to any service or website you can dream up – the link to do that is at the bottom of the “Send To” Settings page.

People are already starting to cook these up. There’s a way to send from Google Reader to Evernote; a way to send to Instapaper; a way to send to ShareThis (which has every social network you can imagine), and many, many more. A little Googling, and I’m betting you can add anything you can think of.

Once you’re all set up, sending items can be done in two ways. You can either go to the end of an item, and click the “Send To” button, which brings up a dropdown menu of all your options; or, hit Shift-T to open the same menu for the current item. I use the keyboard shortcut all the time (I heart keyboard shortcuts), and it’s definitely the fastest solution.

Whether you use Delicious, Twitter, Tumblr, Plurk, or just about anything else, you can now send directly to it from Google Reader – skipping at least one step, and a whole bunch of hassle.

What’s your bookmarking and sharing method of choice?

One option that has become popular in recent months is to create pdf documents out of RSS News Feeds which solves the accessibility problem. Tabbloid is a relatively new Internet service that can turn RSS News Feeds into pdf documents and send those news digest right to the user’s inbox.

This is done by pasting RSS News Feed urls into the form on the main Tabbloid website. The service will check the feed, display a preview of the last news items that have been posted and ask the user to accept or reject it. If the user accepts the feed it gets added to the list of feeds that will be processed.

It is possible to add multiple feeds which would then all be used to fill the pdf document. Options exist to generate the pdf right at the website or set delivery options to receive the pdf document in the inbox. The possible intervals are hourly, daily or weekly.

The created pdf document of the RSS news feeds will look like pretty much like a newspaper. It will not contain images however, only the text and additional information like links. It is therefor easy to load the article on the website directly to post a comment or read it there to see pictures that have been posted.

The pdf documents do not contain advertisement and registration is not required to receive the magazine style RSS News Feeds. The email account has to be verified before the delivery starts.

After setting up an account at Feed Journal you can start adding the RSS feeds that should be included in your personalized newspaper. A maximum number of eight articles per RSS feed can be included in each newspaper that you create. Rather unfortunate is the fact that only the eight latest articles are displayed which means that you can’t create a newspaper with all the interesting articles of the last week because those are not available anymore.

You could however print one daily to cover all articles. Users can change some settings of the newspaper at account setup, namely the format of the newspaper which is by default A4, the number of columns and the margin.

The results are pretty nice but I’m missing some options that would enhance the usability. First, I would like to see a way to add a number of feeds at once. You can only add one feed at a time currently which is not that user friendly if you want to add ten or even fifty feeds. A way to import feeds from an opml would be welcome.

The second option that I would like to see is to be able to pick more articles from a website. The current limit of eight articles does not even come close the the daily amount of articles published at sites like Techcrunch or Lifehacker.

Feed Journal offers a unique promising idea. Blog owners can offer their readers a personalized newspaper, the basic account is free which has however several limits.

Essentially, every link in my feed that pointed to my blog was a Feedburner redirect in the form of http://feeds.ghacks.net/~r/Ghacksnet/~3/172961335/ which did not look that nicely. I did find out that it had something to do with tracking the clicks of the subscribers to be able to compile better statistics. This is something that I did not need and I decided to take a look and see if it was possible to disable the redirect.

It took a while until I found the setting that was responsible for this behavior. If you want to disable it you have to go into the Analyze tab of your feedburner account, click on the ‘Dare to be different?’ link under Site Stats and uncheck ‘Item Link Clicks’ there.

The redirection links will disappear immediately afterwards.

They can send me their list by writing an article on their blog and sending a trackback to mine or contacting me directly through email or commenting in this article. For the sake of reaching a lot of blogs it would be much better if you would write an article in your blog about this and trackback to my blog. If possible, notify the mentioned webmasters of your choice as well so that the ball keeps rolling all the time.

Since the structure of the blogosphere is merely interesting to webmasters I want to make it worthwhile for the readers as well.

All participating blogs will be mentioned here at Ghacks and hopefully at the other blogs as well giving all readers an opportunity to discover related blogs. I will compile a map of all participating blogs.

To start, I name my ten most read feeds. If you are a webmaster and would like to participate just write an article and trackback this article so that I know where to look and gather your ten blogs.

The blogs that I read the most in alphabetical order:

Connected Internet
Cybernet News
Digital Alchemy
Digital Inspiration
Donation Coder
Download Squad
Freeware Genius
Lifehacker
Make Use Of
Raymond

If you want to create a map like I did use the free online service Bubbl.us