Monday, November 10, 2008

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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