I use Google Reader to keep up with both technical and medical blogs. Sometimes I want to flag a post as worth reading, but don’t have the time to write a blog post about it. In this case the “Share” feature is great. I now have the Shared Items listed to the right.
Setting this up took a few steps. Google Reader provides the Share Item feed as an Atom feed, but WordPress’s RSS plugin (based on the somewhat obsolete MagpieRSS v0.51) is finicky and mangles the Atom titles together. Some postings suggest hacking MagpieRSS to work with Google Reader, or upgrading MagpieRSS to a newer version.
I decided to work with what I had. I didn’t want to upgrade MagpieRSS since there is a risk of pulling in a security problem with new code that’s interpreting an RSS feed with unknown content. Instead, I used FeedBurner to change the feed into RSS 1.0. This also gives me access to FeedBurner’s other features and statistics tracking.
One problem I ran into was that the appearance of the RSS widget would not change when I tweaked FeedBurner. This was due to Magpie’s caching behavior, which can be bypassed by changing the line “define(’MAGPIE_CACHE_AGE’, 60*60)” to 1 second.
I then decided to improve my control of the look and feel by upgrading from the standard Wordpress RSS widget to the KB Advanced RSS Widget. This allows control over the HTML generated for each RSS entry. The result is seen to your right.
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