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!
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Hide 19 Comments
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 ?
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: fivefilters.org/content-only/
You mixed up the favicon for Evernote with the WordPress one. The URL should be http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico. :)
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
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!!!
huhuh great
The Evernote favicon is http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico
huhuh great
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!
You can also send to RememberTheMilk.
See http://www.rememberthemilk.com/forums/tips/8037/ for more details.
Evernote suggests this link:
http://s.evernote.com/grclip?url=${url}&title=${title}
I tried the “Send to Evernote” feature but it did not work. And I think you gave a wrong address for its icon URL.
@ gwidianto: Try http://s.evernote.com/grclip?url=${url}&title=${title} and http://www.evernote.com/favicon.ico .
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… :-)
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
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