Sharing your Google reader shared items
I use Google reader all the time, and its cool sharing items that you read about. The only problem is I don’t know many people that use Google Reader and therefore not that many of them see what I share.
So how can we get around this? Well I found out thanks to this website that you can get a RSS feed for your shared items! So I could just hand that out to people but, it would be nice to display it somewhere. So I thought why stop there? My url incase you want to know is:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/01019558499128141290/state/com.google/broadcast
So, I then decided to use the Google AJAX Feed API and very simply I used this little bit of JavaScript to handle it.
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// load the feed API
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google.load("feeds", "1");
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function ajax_feed() {
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var feed = new google.feeds.Feed("long url that messed up my formatting :)");
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feed.load(function(result) {
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if (!result.error) {
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var container = document.getElementById("feed");
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var newHTML = ‘<ol style="padding-left: 20px;">’;
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for (var i = 0; i < result.feed.entries.length; i++) {
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var entry = result.feed.entries[i];
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newHTML += ‘<li><a href="’+entry.link+‘">’ + entry.title + ‘</a></li>’;
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}
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newHTML += ‘</ol>’;
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if(container.innerHTML != newHTML) {
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container.innerHTML = newHTML;
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}
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}
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});
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setTimeout(ajax_feed, 5000);
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}
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window.onload = ajax_feed;
This code basically loads up the feed with Google’s API. It then displays it on the page, easy as that. I added in a 10s loop to keep it refreshing.
I’ve added this to the sidebar of my blog; you can see it on the right, under my latest visitors list!
One of the really cool things about mash-ups like this is how easily I can integrate new systems.