2008-02-03 16:31:58
What Am I Reading?
Thanks to Veronica Belmont for introducing me to Google Reader, you can now see all of the articles that I read on a daily basis.I use Netvibes as my browser's homepage. The previous setup was three tabs within Netvibes. First, was my news, which consisted of Digg, Slashdot, Linux Today, Linux Journal, and RootPrompt. The second tab was my techcasts, which included TWiT, East Meets West, Buzz Out Loud, Tekzilla, and Diggnation to name a few. My third tab is my Google calendar. I have found an extension for Thunderbird (Provider for Google Calendar) that writes all calendar events input through Thunderbird to your Google calendar. This is great because it lets me use a fat client when I'm at home, but still be able to access all of my stuff when I'm away. But I digress...
Google Reader is a nice RSS aggregator. But the feature that put me over the edge is the ability to share. As I go through all of my news, I can click on an individual article's "Share" link and that item goes into the "My Shared Items" area. Google provides two awesome things here. First, is a blog-style page that anyone can go to in order to see what articles I've shared and second is an Atom feed (I wish it were normal RSS) in case you'd rather enter my shared feed into your favorite feed aggregator.
So why does this excite me? Well, my articles about technology are usually about things I've discovered myself while working on various projects. But there is so much cool stuff that other people discover which I read about every day. Now, in addition to the articles I write on my site, I can share with everyone the cool stuff I read about on other people's sites.
So without further ado, here are the ways to get to my shared items:
Blog-style page
Atom feed
As of now, the code Google has released for adding the shared feed to personal websites is clunky and can hang pages while they're loading. Once Google fixes this, I will put the feed in the left pane of my site!
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