I was pretty excited to read about recent enhancements to Google Reader, particularly the “Send to…” feature that allows you to post items from Google Reader into Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and many other sites.
But, I wanted to send things to WordPress and that isn’t in the list. However, the Reader team smartly left a way for you to manually add your own “Send to…” destinations. I considered this and thought it may match well with WordPress built-in “Press this” function. And it does!
You cannot use the “Press this…” function directly in Reader as it is Javascript and Reader wants a URL. But, you can just post directly to press-this.php. The URL is (make sure to replace with your own domain name!)
http://www.YOURDOMAINHERE.com/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=${url}&t=${title}&s=${source}&v=2
Google Reader will substitute the items in braces. Now you have an easy “Send to…” option from Google Reader.
To create this go to Google Reader and open Settings. Select the “Send To” tab and click on the “Create a custom link” button. Then fill it in similar to this picture:
Also, if you want the nice WordPress icon next to the link put the Icon URL in as
http://s.wordpress.org/favicon.ico?3
Have fun blogging!
thingles, I tried the “send to wordpress”, having set it up as indicated for my WP blog, and while it pulls over the google reader item headline and link, all the text, in the body of the post, including the HTML code, is white. I thought it was blank until I highlighted it and saw it there. This happend on both IE8 and Chrome on two different PCs running WinXP. Any idea why?
I’m not entirely sure what you are referring to regarding “highlighted it”. There are only 4 parameters that Google Reader can send, none of them have any of the content of the Reader item being looked at. It would be really nice if they added a #{excerpt} or #{highlighted} tag that would pull the excerpt of the Reader item, or a highlighted selection.
The only thing that will be in the body of the post ready to publish is the Source name #{source} and the link, which is added automatically by press-this.php.
Jamie:
I noticed the comment you left on Mashable’s article about the new additions to Google Reader. Being an avid GR and WPress.com user I have a question for you:
WordPress.com does have the “Press This” functionality enabled. Do you think this might work within WPress.com? I made a few tests and I get as far as Wpress.com asking my login and password again, but that’s it.
Any help on this would be greatly appreciated as this would greatly enhance the Google Reader/ WordPress.com combination.
Keep up the good work
Regards from Mexico City
Hello Angel! I’m not a WordPress.com user, so I don’t know how to tie these together for it. I would assume you just need a slightly different URL to point to? I would suggest installing the Press this bookmarklet, then click on it, and see where it takes you. That URL for press-this.php should work.
Good luck!
Thanks that was very helpful
Hi,
Thanks for that little tip. i really saved me a bit of time and actually i would never have figured out to use the bookmarklet code. well done.
The only slight problem I found, it may just be my server but it did not like www in front of the domain name in the code.
Apart from that it is working a treat. As you say it’s a pity there is no way to include an extract but you can always cut and past that I guess.
it still saves loads of time.
All the best dave
Just trying this out now. I like the functionality. It seems that “via” precedes the article link rather than the source link. It seems backwards. Any ideas on how to fix?
That “via” text in the body is generated inside of press-this.php and isn’t passed in. You could easily change it around by editing press-this.php, but that will be a problem when WordPress upgrades.
…and as the other commenter said, the source link is not ‘linked’ – just text. No www preceding.
Thanks for your efforts!
This is great.
I am curious however. I would like to be able to send certain articles to a sideblog or miniblog on my blog using this “send to” feature. is there a way? Is it possible to to perhaps ‘send to’ a feed that you could put up in the side bar in the blog?
thanks.
What about marking those articles with a tag, and then using the RSS feed for that tag as a source for your sidebar?
Thanks for the article, Jamie. I tried this, and it seems to work.
Thanks bud, that’s just the trick I was looking for.
It would always be better to add a note, or your comments, views on the article.
Gives a personal touch. You may have to spend a little time but its worth it and the reader kindof connects to you thru your opinion on it.
just my 2 cents
This is great, thanks.
Very very useful! I’ve just implemented in my blog. I’ve never understood what the press this was for until now.
Thanks Jamie.
There is a 404 error when i ust your code, is there any way to fix it?
You’ll need to figure out what URL isn’t set right for your implementation. There are specifics to each site that need to be configured.
Hi Jamie, thanks for your explanation, and would you please advise how to figure out what url is wrong? Shall I edit the press-this.php file?
I’m having the same problem … any guidance on what exactly needs to be configured? the .php file, or the URL we add to google reader?
same problem here…. any solutions yet?
If you post what URL you is being requested when you get the 404 I may be able to suggest something. Please make sure you are reading my notes carefully. The URL that I highlighted in the post will not work unless you modify it to fit the characteristics of your WordPress install.
If you are using WordPress.com versus downloading the source from WordPress.org I can’t help. I’ve always self-hosted my WordPress installs so I’m not familiar with the hosted service.
This is great! Totally worked for me! Being that Google Reader is becoming a beast for social media marketing, this is indeed a great function to add to my arsenal of SEO tricks with WordPress!
When I click sendto from Google Reader I get the following message:
“Forbidden
You don’t have permission to access /blog/wp-admin/press-this.php on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.”
The URL looks like this:
http://www.mydomain.com/blog/wp-admin/press-this.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubergizmo.com%2F15%2Farchives%2F2010%2F04%2Fblackberry_curve_9300_shows_up.html&t=BlackBerry%20Curve%209300%20shows%20up&s=Ubergizmo&v=2
Have I done something wrong?
Thanks for the info! You came up quickly in Google and I found just what I needed! In fact, I didn’t even know about the press-this feature. Slick!