10 Cool Google Reader ‘Send To’ Buttons You Can Use to Post Feed Content to Friends

Aug. 22nd, 2009 By Varun Kashyap

The Google Reader team has been rolling out features one after the another to make it more social and fun to use. We always love functionality that has room for experimentation and clever tricks. Be it the auto response in Gmail or the new Google Reader ‘Send-To’ menu.

The Google Reader Send-To button lets you post feed articles to Twitter, Delicious, Blogger, Posterous, Digg, Tumblr and more. If you have not done so you need to go to your Google Reader settings then to the ‘Send To’ tab and choose the sites/services you want to enable. There are already 10+ services and sites you can choose from, however the real action lies a little below.


You can create your own custom menu entries to do all kinds of interesting stuff with the feed articles. Let me explain how:

Google Reader offers you certain placeholders viz ${source}, ${title}, ${url} and ${short-url} which represent the Site, Title, URL and shortened URL of the feed entry you are currently reading. So if you would like to search for the title of the current entry on Google you could easily use the syntax:

http://www.google.com/search?q=${title}

So as along as the site/service you are planning to add allows you to play with the URL you can easily create the menu entry for it.

Here are some examples you can add. (Some sites may not like hot linking to images/icons):

Blog to Wordpress

Name Blog To Wordpress
URL http://www.<yourWordpressDomainName>.com/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=${url}&t=${title}&s=${source}&v=2
Icon URL http://s.wordpress.org/favicon.ico?3

Save as PDF

Name Save as PDF
URL http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL=${url}
Icon URL http://www.adobe.com/lib/com.adobe/template/icon/pdf.gif

Send to Ping.fm

Name Send to Ping.fm
URL http://ping.fm/ref/?link=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL http://ping.fm/_images/icons/ping.png

Share This button

Name Share this
URL http://addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL http://shareicons.com/favicon.ico

Send to Evernote

Name Send to Evernote
URL http://www.evernote.com/grclip?url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL http://s.wordpress.org/favicon.ico?3

Identi.ca

Name Identi.ca
URL http://identi.ca/?action=newnotice&status_textarea=%E2%80%9C${title}%E2%80%9d%3a%20${short-url}
Icon URL http://identi.ca/favicon.ico

View full text of partial feeds

Name Full Text Feed
URL http://fivefilters.org/content-only/makefulltextfeed.php?url=${url}
Icon URL http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1121/1430385323_4d4351d815.jpg

Translate an Article

Name Google Translate
URL http://translate.google.com/translate?u=${url}
Icon URL http://translate.google.com/favicon.ico

Archive with Iterasi

Name Iterasi
URL https://www.iterasi.net/Capture.aspx?q=n&v=1.0&u=${url}
Icon URL https://www.iterasi.net/favicon.ico

Speed Read with Zap Reader

Name Zap Reader
URL http://www.zapreader.com/reader?URL=${url}
Icon URL http://zapreader.com/favicon.ico

Make sure you disable the popup blocker for Google Reader as most of these will open as a popup.

If you have some other cool send to tricks up your sleeve then share with us in the comments!

(By) Varun Kashyap - Programmer, Blogger and Tech Enthusiast, who tweets @VarunKashyap and blogs about tips, tricks and latest on the web at TechCrazy Blog

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18 Comments Add Comment
2009-08-22 14:40:36
annoyed

About your “view full text of partial feeds”
Can you explain how is that supposed to work. Because for me, it opens the item in another tab, in the browser RSS mode, meaning not as nice as opening the original blog item.
I don’t see how is that better than just going to the item itself – a tab is opened (slow) and then I have to close it.
What’s the point ?

2009-08-23 13:36:42
Subscribed to comments via email

annoyed: I’m the author of that service. I don’t use Google Reader but the idea is if a website doesn’t offer a full-text feed, you pass the URL through the service and subscribe to the new URL in Google Reader — or any other news reader. You can test it here to see if it works: http://fivefilters.org/content-only/

2009-08-22 15:04:04
BulletproofMilk
Subscribed to comments via email

You mixed up the favicon for Evernote with the Wordpress one. The URL should be http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico. :)

2009-08-23 00:18:59
Sudeep KP

Here are a couple more that I am using:

Name: Server Side Readability
URL: http://cold-sunrise-39.heroku.com/?t=${url}
Icon URL: http://lab.arc90.com/favicon.ico

Name: PDF Newspaper
URL: http://fivefilters.org/pdf-newspaper/makepdf.php?feed=${url}&title=News&order=desc&images=true&fulltext=true&submit=Create+PDF
Icon URL: http://fivefilters.org/favicon.ico

2009-08-23 02:34:00
Subscribed to comments via email

I have problems with my send to wordpress blog, i dont know what happend, i copy and paste all in the same order changing my domain name but when i try to send to wordpress had an error.. something like: ¨trying to fake eh¨ i was like ehhh

Please help!!!

2009-08-23 02:59:54
2009-08-23 04:05:22
2009-08-23 04:33:08
Subscribed to comments via email

huhuh great
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!

2009-08-23 07:09:17

You can also send to RememberTheMilk.
See http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/tips/8037/ for more details.

2009-08-23 07:12:15
Gandalf

Evernote suggests this link:
http://s.evernote.com/grclip?url=${url}&title=${title}

2009-08-23 07:20:47
gwidianto

I tried the “Send to Evernote” feature but it did not work. And I think you gave a wrong address for its icon URL.

2009-08-23 07:40:10
BulletproofMilk
Subscribed to comments via email

@ gwidianto: Try http://s.evernote.com/grclip?url=${url}&title=${title} and http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico .

2009-08-23 20:47:54

Does anyone notice that when you do the “send to” (whether custom or presets), it shares the Google Reader based url and title… Not the original post urls. Is there any work around this? Google Feed Proxy links (the ones created) are notorious for being broken and unaccessible… :-)

2009-08-29 14:43:30
gxg
Subscribed to comments via email

I wrote a “Send To” link for shortening the URL with bit.ly, see it here: http://exde601e.blogspot.com/2009/08/another-google-reader-to-trick.html

2009-09-03 08:48:21

Thanks for the article….

2009-09-16 09:53:29

This is great site. How can Thanks for you man. THANKS :D

2009-09-16 10:02:20

Thanks for this article….

2009-09-23 08:02:30
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