Google public sharing fixed with Yahoo! Pipes
I love Google Reader for managing and reading my feeds but public sharing leaves something to be desired. I use the share button because it’s right there and I know I’ll be able to find it later. But Google Clippings is kinda clunky. It truncates titles. It indents. Consequently, I could make it almost, but not quite, fit it with the rest of my front page.
I was hoping that latest extension to Reader might address this but it turns out to be a poor imitation of Tumblr, probably trying to ape Facebook sharing with three spoonfuls of cuteness. The shared items page at the unsnappy http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12953360243211055664 comes in four flavours: ‘Default’, ‘Ice -cream’, ‘Ninjas’ or ‘Sea’. Its saving grace is that it includes an RSS feed.
Enter Yahoo! Pipes, herein referred to simply as Pipes. I had another peep at Pipes the other day. It’s a seriously fun construction set for a web geek originally based on mashing up RSS feeds but has now expanded out a little more from the stereotypical superfeed usage.
The useful new feature of interest is serialized PHP output renderer. This means I can suck data through Pipes, process and filter it, then pull it into my own page and present it how I like, i.e. I can fix the problem of Google’s clunky presentation of shared items.
That’s my shared items displayed how I like on my site.
Right now, I’m just displaying headlines but I can see myself knocking up simonhammond.com/shared for my Reader-shared stuff at my very next recreational coding break.
