Category Archives: Google Reader

[UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading

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[UPDATE, January 30, 2010: I think I found a solution. I created an additional notify.me account, so now I can handle two different flows.

(1) Shared reading:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (1st account) -> Ping.fm -> Twitter, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Identi.ca, Plurk

(2) (Other) status updates / microblog posts:

Twitter -> Yahoo! Pipe -> notify.me (2nd account) -> Ping.fm -> LinkedIn, Typepad, Hi5, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plaxo, Facebook, Identi.ca, Plurk, Tumblr

(3) Posting from any other place (e.g. Skype) to Ping.fm, or from the Ping.fm web UI:

-> Ping.fm -> @tt in post -> Twitter -> (see 2 above)

I'm testing now. Hope it will work this way.

Tweet: http://ping.fm/txw1h [UPDATE: solution] Struggling to re-route my microblog posts and shared reading

Okay, method number (3), with the @tt prefix, seems to work. At least it seems to post to Twitter only…]

Twitter's implementation of "reply" and "retweet" functionality inside its web UI is compelling me to set it apart from other social networks that support status updates and microblog posts.

Where I used to input my microblog posts in Ping.fm in order to distribute them to virtually all my accounts on social web services (including Twitter), I now find it a better idea to input on Twitter first, and then have my tweets automatically route to the other services.

Why? Because I want to use Twitter's "reply" and "retweet" buttons whenever an interesting conversation unfolds on Twitter.

Until now, I would type in the @ or RE or RT syntax manually. This involved the same effort whether on the Twitter web UI or on the Ping.fm web UI. So I would usually go to Ping.fm in order to spread my tweet across services.

Twitter now adds useful metadata when e.g. replying to a tweet. Due to that metadata, you can actually see on Twitter to which tweet I was replying. This is very useful. Since that metadata does not travel with my message when I write it on Ping.fm, I am compelled to write every reply on Twitter itself.

One such compelling reason is enough for me to switch from Ping.fm to Twitter.

Current flow:

Ping.fm -> all my accounts on social web services

AND:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> notify.me -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts

Desired flow:

Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)

AND:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Twitter -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (except Twitter)

OR:

Google Reader -> Yahoo! Pipes -> (notify.me?) -> Ping.fm -> all my accounts (including Twitter)

The challenge that I've run into is to do with notify.me. As far as I can tell, I can setup notify.me to post to Ping.fm in one way only: either for Ping.fm to post to Twitter only, or for Ping.fm to post to all my social web accounts (including or excluding Twitter).

I'm wondering if there's a hack, or whether I will need to find another service, similar to notify.me, in order to create a different route.

I've been trying some syntax suggested by Ping.fm in order to specify to which services it should post – by including that syntax into the Yahoo! Pipes feed.

In particular, I've tried to include #T in the Yahoo! Pipe after I had created a posting group "#T" on Ping.fm which included only Twitter. To no effect.

I then tried to include @tt in the Yahoo! Pipe hoping that Ping.fm would post only to Twitter, but none of those posts seem to go through at all. Three of them were picked up by notify.me, but none appeared on my "recent posts" on Ping.fm.

(I do apologize for my messy language here. It's late and I should really be sleeping. But this is bugging me.)

LATER: Right, after I removed "@tt" from the Yahoo! Pipe, my Google Reader shared reading items do seem to go through again.

EVEN LATER: Well, maybe not. But I need to get some sleep now. Let's see how much has gone through by sunrise. In any case, seems like I need to find an additional grab-and-post service like notify.me in order to enable two out of three routes from the desired flow described above.

Shared reading back on

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[UPDATE, January 30, 2010: I managed to create different flows for status updates / micro-blog post that include and that don't include shared reading]

Just released the brakes from my shared reading feed again.

I managed to address only one of the three issues I mentioned yesterday, but I think it's the most important one: to make clear to readers of my blog that the posts in question are my shared reading, that they are re-blogged and that they originate elsewhere.

So I'll let it run for a while to see what it looks and feels like.

How I did it was by fetching my shared reading feed from Google Reader, into Yahoo! Pipes. There I managed to modify the contents of the item.title element, using the Regex Module, and the regular expression "$" to locate the end of the string (the end of the title), and replace it by the text string " | (re-blogged!)

Also, using the same tools, with the regular expression "^", I managed to insert the following string at the beginning of the item.description element as well as at the beginning of the item.content element:

(NOTE: This post was re-blogged as shared reading. Please, follow the
reference link at the end of this post to where it was originally
published. – Jos Schuurmans;
http://www.josschuurmans.com/shared-reading/)

This is the resulting feed from Yahoo! Pipes, which anyone can clone and edit:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/josschuurmans/google_reader_shared_reading

And this is the resulting RSS feed:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=9E0LgSpU3hGzB8Xd8cv2rw&_render=rss

I would still like to (1) offer a line break at the end of my insert, (2) activate the URL and perhaps (3) format the text a bit, but I have no idea how to.

What I also didn't manage to do was to shorten the body text of each item, nor to activate the embedded links. Later, perhaps.

Now, notify.me subscribes to this feed, and posts it via Ping.fm onto my blogs at www.josschuurmans.com and josschuurmans.wordpress.com. I'm considering how to route them as micro-blog post as well.

I like playing around with Yahoo! Pipes. I think it's a very powerful tool. However, even though it has a nice graphical editing pane and "you don't need to be able to write a single line of code", it still poses quite a learning curve for non-geeks like me.

For example, there must be a way to insert the name of the author (i.e. the value which corresponds with the item.author.name element), automagically into the item title. Any pointers?

Related question: who competes with Yahoo! Pipes in this space?

Need to improve the shared reading feed

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[NEXT DAY: Shared reading back on]

Okay, a couple of things:

#1: Yesterday's experiment with Google Reader, notify.me and Ping.fm was interesting. Turns out that notify.me quite nicely posts entire blog posts from my Google Reader shared reading feed to Ping.fm, which posts them again entirely onto my Typepad-hosted blog at www.josschuurmans.com.

I was quite surprised to notice that in this way, Ping.fm does not limit its posts to 140 chars. That's good news!

However, I immediately pulled the brakes on my Google Reader sharing, because the posts which are re-blogged this way from my shared reading onto my blog appear in nearly every detail as if they were original posts by me. This was not my intention. The only thing tipping off the fact that these (re-blogged) posts were originated elsewhere is the "reference" link at the bottom of the posts.

Sorry, Fred Wilson and Marshall Kirkpatrick, no identity theft intended!

By the way, perhaps not so good is how notify.me and/or Ping.fm handles links in the text. As far as I can tell they disappear, so one (or both) of these pass-through services strip(s) off the links.

So, before I start sharing again this way, I want to improve a few things:

  1. Clearly mention at the beginning of the post that it originates
    elsewhere (explaining the reference link at the end), and how it got
    re-blogged.
  2. Shorten the re-blogged post. It doesn't need to be the whole post. A paragraph or two will suffice.
  3. Keep the embedded links alive if possible (I don't know how to do this).

I am hoping that I can make some of these things happen by inserting an extra step: if I can modify the Google Reader shared reading feed in Yahoo! Pipes, perhaps I can shorted the posts and add some standard info text before parsing them further through notify.me and Ping.fm?

#2: Next I want to see if updates of my bookmarks on Opera Link can somehow be turned into an RSS feed, which I could then read and share via Google Reader and the rest of the process described above.

#3: One reason why I didn't switch from Typepad to WordPress last time I compared the two, was that I couldn't think of an easy way to export my Typepad blog and import it into WordPress. Now, if I could re-blog posts on Typepad, then let notify.me route them via Ping.fm onto my WordPress blog, would that offer a somewhat quicker, but still quite dirty way to re-publish my blog from one platform onto the other?

Not sure about this, tough. For one thing, I may have to manually correct all the publishing dates. For another, looks like the links would disappear. Not to mention the comments… :-(

So, I'm still in the market for a better idea to export-import from Typepad to WordPress.

Reading and sharing; the mobile saga continues

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[NEXT DAY:  I need to improve the shared reading feed!]

In my continued struggle to set up a system which would allow me to bookmark, save, tag, annotate, aggregate, integrate and/or share anything I read online (on machines with various degrees of mobility), I am now using Google Reader as my main reading tool.

(I have been complaining before about the lack of social awareness of the mobile environment)

What I read and what I can do with it next is important to me. I like Google Reader's "Note in Reader" browser plug-in, for it allows me to "keep" content on the web which I browse but haven't (yet) subscribed to.

Problem is, when browsing Google Reader on my S60 mobile phone I can only "star" or "share" the items in the feeds I have already subscribed to. Even the outbound links in those Google Reader feeds I cannot mark.

The best workaround I know for this is to bookmark links outside of Google Reader within the Opera Mini browser, then synchronize those bookmarks with Opera Link, view them in a browser on a PC or Mac sometime later at home or at the office, and add them to Google Reader manually, using the "Note in Reader" plug-in.

That's not a very smooth workaround! Please, tell me you know a better way!

While most of the above concerns the capturing of my reading, I would also very much like to share my reading (and annotations), e.g. on my blog, in the most integrated fashion. That means, I would like that reading to be published on my blog, just like any other blog posts.

I am already using a few services which call Typepad's API to post stuff, notably Delicious' daily links and Ping.fm. I wish I could have Google Reader automagically post my shared reading straight onto my blog (not as a sidebar).

Now I just looked at notify.me's relatively new Ping.fm feature. So I added my Google Reader's shared reading feed as a source to notify.me, then selected Ping.fm as a destination for this feed.

I set up Ping.fm to post stuff to my various accounts on social media and social networking sites, including my blog at www.josschuurmans.com.

Curious to see what will happen with this scenario:

Opera Mini -> bookmark -> synchronize -> Opera Link -> "Note in Reader" -> Google Reader shared reading -> notify.me -> Ping.fm -> www.josschuurmans.com / Twitter / Facebook / etc.

Never mind the 140 chars limitations. Or actually: mind!

[In the meantime:] WOW! I just had a look and something did happen while I was writing this post. Interesting; to be continued..

P.S.: In an attempt to edit RSS feeds before subscribing to them in Google Reader, I was using Yahoo! Pipes earlier today. My goal was to follow (only) Marshall Kirkpatrick's produce on ReadWriteWeb, so I fetched the RSS feed from RWW into Yahoo! Pipes, then filtered its contents by author, to output a modified RSS feed.

Here is the pipe:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/josschuurmans/rww_marshall_kirkpatrick

and this is the feed: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=3MwoDOBS3hGSVPSx8cv2rw&_render=rss

I was able to add this new feed to my "myYahoo!" page but, to my surprise, I couldn't get Google Reader to subscribe to it. So, what's that about?

P.P.S: Do I hear you saying that all this can be fixed with an iPhone or a Nokia N97? How?