Inspired by FeedDemon (see #7), the Google Reader team has added some useful features in their popular web based feed reader program including a new "Send To" option that lets users share and bookmark stories directly from Google Reader.
For instance, you can now save articles on to your delicious account or send them to your Twitter stream in few clicks – select the Google Reader story that you want to share, press Shift + T (or click the "Send To" link with your mouse) and choose the social site where you want to send that story.
It’s that simple. Google Reader comes pre-loaded with links to some popular social services but if the one you use frequently is missing from that default list (e.g. Mister Wong, FriendFeed or even LinkedIn), add it manually from the settings page.
Create Your Own "Send To" Items for Google Reader
Tip #1: If you want to quickly save stories from Google Reader to your hard drive in PDF format, create a new custom link with the following settings:
Name: Save as PDF
URL: http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL=${url}
Icon URL: http://www.adobe.com/lib/com.adobe/template/icon/pdf.gif
Tip #2: Dealing with Partial Feeds
When you use the "Email This" option inside Google Reader, the full text and images of that story are sent via email. This is great for full-text feeds but what do you do in the situation where the RSS publisher is syndicating only partial feeds? Well, here’s a workaround.
Name: Email This
URL: mailto:www@web2mail.com?subject=${url}
Icon URL: http://mail.google.com/favicon.ico
Now when you select "Email this" from the Send To menu, a request is sent to the web2mail service (see #0) – it will fetch the whole web page from the original URL and will send you the contents via email.
Tip #3: If you are planning to add multiple social sites to that Send To menu in Google Reader, wait. What you can do is add a link to any of your favorite social bookmarking widgets and that will give you access to almost every popular social site from the Google menu.
Here are the settings for addthis.com but you may even use addtoany.com or sharethis.com.
Name: Share This
URL: http://addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL: http://shareicons.com/favicon.ico
Tip #4: Track related conversations
If you like to know how the web world has reacted to an article that you are currently reading inside Google Reader, add a new "Conversations" custom link with the following settings:
Name: Conversations
URL: http://backtweets.com/search?q=${url}
Icon URL: http://backtweets.com/favicon.ico
You may use a similar approach for tracking reactions in the blogosphere – replace BackTweets with either Technorati or Google Blog Search.
Also see: Lifestreaming with Google Reader
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/download-google-reader-stories-as-pdf/9389/
Tags: Archives, Downloads, google reader, hacks, Most Popular, pdf, rss, Internet
Reader Comments
Awesome tips, keep going dude
Written by Vishwas on 08.13.09
I couldn’t not find “Email This” option in my “send to” in Google reader. Is this only available to select users only ?
Written by shafeek on 08.13.09
I will have to try that ShareThis link!
I made an Instapaper one, check it out if you use Instapaper: link
Written by Will Robertson on 08.13.09
Thank you so much for this great discovery. You are great. I am just thinking why I could not think about this.
Written by Madhav Tripathi on 08.13.09
Great tips, thanks!
If only somebody would do the same with conversion into audiobook. It would be great to have some longish posts read out loud for me while I work out or wash the dishes. I could do that locally on my mac. Is there a webservice doing that? Could we add that to Google Reader?
Written by László Sándor on 08.13.09
Vishwas, reread the article. Email This is a link you create with the “Create Custom Link” option.
Thank you for this, Amit.
Written by Erik on 08.13.09
This is very cool! Here’s a potentially stupid question: the custom URL I’m using is for a REST interface — it returns an XML response code… Is there anyway to ignore that? When I use my custom “send to”, the link gets added just fine — but I end up w/a new tab displaying the XML result.
Thanks!
Written by chris on 08.13.09
Great tips, this is something that will make Google Reader more useful, I have always been waiting for them to add the share features and look what we can do with it now :-)
Written by Keith Dsouza on 08.13.09
Nice tip! I’ll try in on next time I use g-reader :)
Written by Pattty on 08.13.09
@shafeek,
This article describes how to ADD the “Email This” option to the “send to” menu in Google Reader. In fact, the point of this article is to show some useful custom options to easily add to Google Reader, not to showcase existing built-in ones.
Written by StareClips.com on 08.13.09
I’m not sure why, but I keep getting the following error message when I try the “Save as PDF” hack:
“URL is not in a valid format”
I’ve re-generated the ADD Email This option twice, just to ensure that I’d copied over the code correctly.
Written by Ken on 08.13.09
@Ken
I know in my browser the last part of that code in the URL section didn’t show. There’s a closing curly bracket on the end that I was only able to see when I did “View Source”.
It should end like this:
…pdfonline.asp?cURL=${url}
Written by mkl on 08.13.09
Hi,
very great tips!
But these is possibility to “sent to” at my Evernote account the Google reader news?
Written by fabiobianco on 08.14.09
Nice article! I also created (with a little help from other users) an Identi.ca ’send-to’ link. Details below if anybody would like the to the same.
Name: Identi.ca
URL: identi.ca/?action=newnotice&status_textarea=%E2%80%9C${title}%E2%80%9d%3a%20${short-url}
Icon URL: identi.ca/favicon.ico
Written by Narrf on 08.14.09
Here’s how to bookmark and share to any service using AddToAny:
link
Written by Pat on 08.14.09
This pdf converter is bad. Just try converting a lifehacker post if u disagree :)
Written by Sai on 08.16.09
will anyone tells me abt how to send any article to my wordpress.com blog thru this tweak?
Written by majhiduniya on 08.16.09
Very useful tips!
I have created a custom link for bit.ly, see here: link
Written by gxg on 08.18.09