Google Reader, Feedburner & Blogger... Wheres the integration?

Ive got a simple idea. I want a link blog. A simple, short, "this is what i think" comment on the articles I've been reading.
It may seem simple, but making it how I want has proved to be too much trouble for me to continue down the road I had hoped to go down.

I have a Blogger account,
I use google reader as my feed reader,
I want to post my comments on the blog articles to a blogger blog from google reader.
Simple enough?

Wrong it seems.

Blog this is useless in google reader, since it doesnt work when on google reader pages, it nabs the google reader URL not the blog article.
To use it id have to manualy open each and every article & blog them after they load, which becomes tedious when your trying to blog the comments youve made on 4 to 5 hundred feeds.

Google Reader has a great feature... shared items & notes. Its perfect.
Except for its pathetic lack of features.
In case anyone hasn't noticed yet.
There's a few major issues with Google Reader that have yet to be addressed by the developers.

1: Tags in folders. (don't even think they CAN do this, since they've built the entire thing by treating folders AS tags) infact the entire sidebar in general is a problem. Such as why i have to hide it to get articles to use the whole screen width... this quirk alone seems utterly daft.

2: Tab order when in the Note an article popup. Tabbing throws you out of the section back to the search box in the main part of Google Reader. When I'm working with the keyboard shortcuts... its very irritating to have to reach for the mouse to make a tiny click to get to the next field when tab should obviously be working.

3: Style... Has anyone looked at the options for the style of your Shared Items page... yes i have a fully customized Blogger layout, and to make my Shared Items match that theme... ill take the ninjas header picture & the blank white page to match my BLACK theme... well done Google this is about the worst I've seen from you.

4: You have a share the item link, a Share the item with Note link, but no Just Note the item link... i have to manually remove the check box flag to share the item every time... google... FIX THIS, its not like you have to rebuild from scratch.


Now these four things are my main problems with google reader.
In particular id like to talk about number 3.
Google has everything within their power to build something better.
Why cant they.
I can build some convoluted re-poster script to scrape my Google Reader shared items & post it to blogger if i want, but i don't want to. that defeats the purpose of using the Note & sharing features.

I toyed around with Google Mashup Editor, with Google App Engine (though this I'm not yet finished trying to use to fix my problems), and Yahoo pipes. At the crux of it all is the fact that i like how the blogger template handles things for my blog and to rebuild everything up around a new soloution just to integrate my linkblog/commenting in a way i like is far too much effort to go to for the sake of these links.

Google Please add something to fix this.
You have the time to implement pretty trend graphs and havent managed to produce any improvements over the to be honest... pathetic... level of customisation. You so proudly added tags available for notes and havent seemed to come up with anything realy useful since.

Please Google Reader Team... Talk to the Blogger guys, get some communication going, and let me use the Google Reader shared/noted items along side my blog with pride.

Cause right now... its hard to be proud of a page that looks like I put not time at all into making it look different (even if i cant make it look different)

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Site Redesign Coming

As fitting a big change like this.
Im updating the templates & going to be integrating all the new stuff in together.
So template updates & new look changes due soon!

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Extrospection

Its an interesting few things that have all mixed together today.
Crossing several sets of ideas & some of my background reading has led me to some thoughts on the nature of my thoughts, online communication, online expression & writing and how it can be presented and delivered online.

I initially began with a small mountain of thought... I'm a prolific thinker, i can chew through several hundred blog posts a day, muse out a sizeable idea or two each day and somehow spend 8 hours at work complete with the normal wishes it was better, and gripes that i feel like sharing about my job. When I work through all of it & begin to tag & muse over it all. Theres a lot of stuff below the big idea layer. Most of it doesnt rate a full thought out blog post like this one. But its still worth sharing or commenting on.

So how can a blogger share all of this less structured information?

Micro-blogging, lifecasting, tweets, blips, bloops... seems like every time I look there is a new word for a new way to send something to either your friends or the world at large.

I used to ride the front of the wave, I was jumping on gtalk the day it came out, with no one else in my contact list using it for weeks. However i reached an overload point.
I became burdened with the task of avoiding unwanted communication, the signal to noise ratio of being a member of no less than 5 IM networks + several IRC channels became too much. If the signal i sought was random chatter i found it, but if i wanted to just have a quick technical chat to someone, it would be drowned out rather rapidly by people messaging me to say Hi or see how i was doing. I Pulled the plug on it all quite some time ago, & I'm now offline more than on (at least for IM).

But recently as I've begun to sink myself more into expressing myself through my various outlets, I've felt the urge to reconnect to the world, but i dont want to go back to the way it was, blocking & un blocking the chatty freinds that wont stop talking.
And so I wont. Ive been a fan of the microblogging idea for a while now, i used to do it years before it was popular infact. my first few weeks of blogging were filled with the 15 minute interval status updates, my mood, my work, my life etc.
And its come full circle again, Ive developed a plan for my content & how to manage it. Taking some inspiration from some of the very first examples of these kinds of message streams.

The idea of a stream of conciousness style of blog is not new, one of the first good examples is Anarchaia by christian neukirchen. He details the origins back in 2005

Inspired by the various examples ive perused, I've settled on a method of structuring my writings. Separating the content out into at least 3 distinct flows to avoid creating a blog that is unreadably frequent in its updates.
1: the 'Blog' type portion, containing extended works & original material from myself such as projects & code as well as posts like this one.
2: the 'note & tag' feed, where ill be posting shorter & more concise commentary on sites, other peoples blog & forum posts, videos, pictures, and all the other stuff that gets trawled as i go through my day.
3: the 'realtime' feed, this is where things get interesting, rather than going out and joining twitter or some other site (which i may do later & integrate back those updates into this feed, but for now its standalone) i will be posting the status changes, block schedule notices, random gripes & venting, and all the usual fodder for such short quick posts.

Its not 100% set in stone & obviously there's grey area between these 3 feeds, but thats the plan for now and ill be working on how to get it all rolling as i get the gears turning over the next few days.

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Future Work

A brief rundown on the upcoming plans for my blog follows after the break

[1] More frequent updates.
[2] Commenting on internet news & such... (Im getting myself all setup with some nice tagging & stuff to make this very easy for myself)
[3] More Layout Hax... percentage based layout with minwidth properties to prevent ridiculous glitching.
[4] Something about my Model M keyboards.
[5] Some more code work

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Templating

New template time.
It took a while longer than I thought to work it out but here is the new template.
Its not quite finished yet but I was happy enough to post this up now so as to give an idea where its heading.

The template has switched to a 3 column layout to create some more sidebar options & I may tweak the sidebar a bit more if I dont like how the various widgets & gadgets fit.
Also i may adjust the size so as to widen the page just a bit more since I'm not sure if I'm satisfied with the proportions of the post text section v. the rest of the elements.

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CEO of Nothing... for now

How does one begin... well at the beginning I suppose. I read a very good book once (Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars for those playing at home) and the book has a beginning in it, not the beginning of the book, but an event in it. Man's first steps on Mars, the era of manned martian exploration begins as it should with famous words. The first words on Mars, "Well here we are..." I cannot think of a more appropriate beginning. Its not a famous line its an honest one. I often step back a little in my mind and look for something to say about it all, at those moments where you try and take stock in life I almost always find myself thinking "Well here we are...".

And so, at the beginning of my renewed efforts.

Well here we are...

Now getting to business, I've gotten back into my blog because with a new job & new efforts I've had a renewed urge to make my mark on the world. Which leads to the conclusion... how do you make yourself stand out, how do you get your voice noticed let alone stand out. I suppose that's the reason Search Engine Optimisation has become an industry so fast.

Cutting a bit of the waffling around out of the process. Ive been doing a lot of programing again lately. Seems like every time i start a job I spend quite a while having to rebuild my little cozy environment with the programs/tools i like.
Switching from pre XP era NT terminal emulation programs to Putty was the first big step. Building some quick simple HTA "programs" to help with a few of the little tedious task makes a big improvement. Id like to rebuild everything from scratch but well I'm pretty sure that even though the security doesn't stop me. program incompatibilities make it not worth the effort.

With all the programing I've begun to want to do more work in other areas.
Ive been looking into IronPython a bit and I've quickly realised while its quite handy at building windows applications using python skills & native GUI elements its currently in a bad state of flux. Once SharpDevelop 3 gets out and the IronPython v2 extension is available it will be a much more useful programing language for me again.

So I've switched back to focusing on my general python skills & have begun work once again on my Python tools.
A set of basic utilities built entirely in Python. Basic & fundamental tools, Ping, Traceroute, etc built with python.
Work has been slow but it does progress. Once i get them in a more suitable state i plan on releasing the source & creating a public repository.

Touching base on the Title for a moment I'll just point out its a reflection on the fact i hope to accomplish more from my life and this is hopefully the starting point.

I'm also tweaking my page template & hopefully ill have changed the look a little before my next post.
Ill leave things there since i really want to work on the new template but hate leaving a post with some significant content unposted. It feels half done if i don't submit the work unless it just fizzles & winds up not being worth posting.

Next update will accompany the new template.

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