Add Items to Your Google Reader Link Blog Without Subscribing

Unlike newer services including FriendFeed and AssetBar, Google Reader doesn't enable you to share items to your shared items link blog without first having an RSS feed subscription to the said site. But there is a work-around for this limitation, which lets you share an item without committing to any kind of long-term, or even short-term, relationship with the blog it came from.

(See also: #4 in 10 Suggestions to Improve Google Reader from March '07)

To do so, you need to be using a feature in Google Reader's "Goodies" page, under your Settings, which they call "Subscribe as you surf". Essentially, you are adding a bookmark that with one click, prompts you to add an RSS-enabled site to your Google Reader.


I've personally added this bookmark to my Safari toolbar as "+GR", standing for "add to Google Reader", and click it whenever I find a must-subscribe site. But if you're in a gray area, and find a site that has a great article, but is one you don't think you'll be subscribing to, there's still a way to get it on your link blog.

1. Click your new "Subscribe as you surf" bookmark.

Google Reader will show you what the feed will look like if you choose to subscribe, with the note "You are not subscribed to this feed yet" along with a "Subscribe" button.


2. Scroll to the item or items you want to share on your link blog.

3. Hit the share option.

Then you can exit out of the feed subscription window by clicking All Items, getting back to your feed reading, or get on with your life. Sure enough, even though you never did subscribe to that site, their item made its way to your link blog, to be shared with your Google friends, and services like ReadBurner.

Until Google finds a more direct way to share items from the Web directly to your link blog, this is a fairly simple work-around, one I've been using on occasion and will be trying to make more-frequent use of in the future

Share Almost n Most Any Blog Post in Google Reader

Google Reader's sharing feature is very cool, but it's limited to your subscriptions. If you find an interesting post and you want to share it with your friends without subscribing to the feed, Google Reader is not very helpful. On a closer look, you'll notice that Google Reader lets you preview any feed without subscribing to it if you go to this page:



http://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/FEED_URL



But it's not that easy to find the feed and build that URL every time you want to share a post. And even if you do that, you'll still have to find the post.



So I created a bookmarklet that automates the process: it finds the feed and creates a different URL that tells Google Reader to search for the page's title in that feed. Hopefully, the first result is the page you want to share.



Here's how to add the bookmarklet to your browser (because of a Google Reader bug, this doesn't work in Opera and Safari):



1. Make sure the link toolbar is visible in your browser. You can enable it if you go to the View menu in your browser, click on Toolbars and check:

* Bookmarks Toolbar in Firefox

* Links in Internet Explorer



2. Don't click on the link below! For Firefox, right-click on the link, select "Bookmark this Link" and choose "Bookmarks Toolbar" from the dropdown. For Internet Explorer, right-click on the link, select "Add to Favorites", ignore the security warning and choose "Links" from the list of folders.



Share in Google Reader



Note that you'll be able to share pages only from sites that have feeds and only if you go to the blog post, not to the blog's homepage. If the post is very recent, it's likely that Google Reader didn't index it yet. If the page's title is not identical to the post's title, select the title before clicking on the bookmarklet.









Credits: the bookmarklet contains code from Google Reader's subscription bookmarklet; based on a idea by Louis Gray.

Google Reader's "Send to" Feature

Google Reader added a new feature that lets you share posts in other services: Twitter, Facebook, Digg. The feature is opt-in, so you need to go to the settings page, click on the "Send to" tab and pick your favorite services.


After selecting an item, use the keyboard shortcut Shift+T to quickly open the "send to" menu. Google Reader opens a new tab when you choose one of the "send to" options and most of the necessary information it's already pre-filled.


If your favorite service is not included in Google Reader's list, you can add it from the settings page by clicking on "Create a custom link". Here's how to add a "send to" option for Google Bookmarks.

Name: Google Bookmarks
URL: http://www.google.com/bookmarks/mark?op=edit&output=popup&bkmk=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.google.com/favicon.ico

And here's how to use AddToAny, a service that lets you select between many social sites.

Name: Add to Any
URL: http://www.addtoany.com/share_save?linkurl=${url}&linkname=${title}
Icon URL: http://www.addtoany.com/favicon.ico

Google Reader added two other options: you can now subscribe to sites added to your contacts' profiles and mark as read items older than a day, a week or two weeks. The second option is useful if you have a lot of unread items and you only want to read the recent news. As you probably know, Google Reader automatically marks as read the items that are older than a month and this can't be changed.