Regurgitated from an original post on simonhammond.com/blog on May 6, 2008.
I love Google Reader for managing and reading my feeds but public sharing leaves something to be desired. I use the share button because it’s right there and I know I’ll be able to find it later. But Google Clippings is kinda clunky. It truncates titles. It indents. Consequently, I could make it almost — but not quite — fit it with the rest of my site.
I was hoping that latest extension to Reader might address this but it turns out to be a poor imitation of Tumblr, probably trying to ape Facebook sharing with three spoonfuls of cuteness. The shared items page at the unsnappy http://www.google.com/reader/shared/12953360243211055664 comes in four flavours: ‘Default’, ‘Ice -cream’, ‘Ninjas’ or ‘Sea’. Its saving grace is that it includes an RSS feed.
Enter Yahoo! Pipes, herein referred to simply as Pipes. I had another peep at Pipes the other day. It’s a seriously fun construction set for the web originally based on mashing up RSS feeds but has now expanded out a little more from the stereotypical superfeed usage.
The useful new feature of interest is serialized PHP output renderer. This means I can suck data through Pipes, process and filter it, then pull it into my own page and present it how I like, i.e. I can fix the problem of Google’s clunky presentation of shared items.
Right now, I’m just displaying headlines at simonhammond.com/shared. That’s my shared items displayed how I like on my site. And that gives me the warm, happy feeling. Best of all would have it being served up from my own copy but for the moment I’ve enough confidence in Reader, Pipes and Delicious to provide.