How To Combine and Publish All Your Shared Items

// 4.16.08 // Filed under: Tech & Blogging

A lot of people, myself included, use Google Reader’s “share” option to show the posts they are reading and enjoying. But when I come across a post I want to share that is not in my Google Reader, I don’t necessarily want to subscribe to the feed just to be able to share that post in GReader. So I use social bookmarking service Del.icio.us. But then my “Shared Items” page in GReader is not an accurate representation of everything online that I want to share.

In his article, “Seven Tips for Making the Most of Your RSS Reader,” Marshall Kirkpatrick talks about his method of tagging items “toshare” in Del.icio.us and then publishing the RSS feed for that specific tag through Feedburner. This allows him to see how many people are following his shared items and even motivates him to read and share posts.

I loved Marshall’s idea, yet wondered how I could effectively display everything I wanted to share online. I do a good amount of feed-reading through my mobile phone and if I shared something in GReader, I didn’t want to have to click out of Reader to the blog page and tag it with Del.icio.us in order to get it into my shared items feed. Enter Yahoo! Pipes.

At first glance, it seemed Pipes was a bit like Photoshop: I could use the basic functions, but I was only scratching the surface of its awesome power. So I read and Googled and tonight I would like to introduce my first Yahoo! Pipe, published through FeedBurner: Shannon’s Shared Items. This feed merges the items I share on Del.icio.us AND Google Reader, removes dupes and sorts by date.

Here’s how you can do it:

• In your Del.icio.us bookmark page (you can use whatever social bookmarking service you want), create a tag called “shares” and tag a few posts. Click on that tag in Del.icio.us and find the RSS link at the bottom of the page. Copy that URL.
• In Google Reader, you’ll also create a tag called “shares” and tag a few posts. Click on “Manage Subscriptions,” then “Tags.” Find the “shares” tag and click the icon next to it to make it public instead of private. Click on “view public page” and find the feed URL at the bottom of the right column. Copy that URL.
• Now go to Yahoo! Pipes. If you want to start from scratch with your own pipe, check out this excellent tutorial. Or feel free to take advantage of my pipe to become familiar with using it. Go here, click “clone” then “edit source.” In the “Fetch Feed” module, enter your two URLs created above. Save it with a new name and click “run pipe.” On that page you should see the RSS icon and “more options.” Click on that and copy the URL for “Get as RSS.”
• Take the URL of your pipe’s RSS and bring it on over to Feedburner. Burn a new feed and slap that link up on your blog. Or put it in a widget or headline animator. It’s all good.

Yahoo! Pipes has been around for quite awhile, but it’s new and exciting to me and I’m loving how I created this Shared Items feed. If you have other exciting and useful ways to use Pipes, let me know!

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