Now Playing: Dark Was The Night
I’ve had this cough for about a week now – ever since we got back from spending New Years Eve in Prague and the cold moved into my lungs, and just about every night I’m awakened by coughing, and the only way to fix it is to sit upright for a bit, despite how tired I may be. Oh well, it makes for some interesting late-night hacks.
As for tonight’s project, I’ve been trying to figure out a way to more seamlessly curate this blog with content from my Google Reader subscription…
Image via CrunchBase
My first approach was to Google around for “Google Reader API” – the results: garbage. Google is really (surprisingly) behind on their API writing. As a side note, I first realized how lacking Google is in their API writing when I had to figure out how many Plus Ones any given blog entry had received for work. As of that time we first found that there is no Google Plus API, then tried to reverse-engineer a Plus One button, and then eventually learned that we could use a remote procedure call to get the Plus One data. Ugly, ugh.
My next thought was that maybe I could share the data to some common link sharing service like Digg or Delicious and then hit their API to get the data here. That would work, but I’d love to cut down on the middleman if possible, so I kept looking.It turns out, Google Reader provides this really interesting custom “Send To” service. If you go to “Settings” in Google Reader and click the “Send To” tab, at the bottom you can click “Create a custom link” where you can create a link in your Reader that will hit some external URL with the story data. Perfect!
Wow that description of what I’ve been up to got long fast… Oh well, if you were curious, that’s how I’m doing this thing lately. That’s all for now, stay tuned for a music post…
