How to Tweet Blog Posts From Google Reader Using Starred Items and Tags
Google Reader is the most popular online RSS reader used by web users. Google Reader allows you to categorize individual feed items using Tags, starred items and shared items. Further, you can create a publicly accessible feed for any of these items and share blog posts with anyone.
If you are a heavyweight Twitter user and want an easy way to Tweet blog posts from Google Reader, here is an easy trick.
Automatically Tweet Blog posts when you mark a Feed item as “Starred”
Google Reader has a “Starred items” feature which lets you bookmark blog posts within Google reader for later reading. You can create a public feed from the starred items and use the public feed to cross post Google Reader starred items in your Twitter account.
1. First, log in to Google Reader account and go to Settings. Select “Your Public page” and choose “public” from the dropdown menu.
Google reader starred items
2. Click “View public page” link and go to the public page of your Google Reader starred items.
Rss feed of Google Reader starred items
Click the RSS icon from the browser address bar and subscribe to the publicly accessible feed of your Google Reader starred items.
3. Go to TwitterFeed and add your Twitter account. Next, add the above RSS feed as a new service.
Whenever you add a new blog post in Google Reader starred items, the blog post is added in this public feed. Twitterfeed will access this feed in due time and if it finds an update, a tweet will be sent to your Twitter account. In this way, you can schedule and autopost Google reader starred items to one or multiple Twitter accounts. (also read: Create RSS and blogroll widgets using Google Reader)
Tweet Feed Items from a Particular Tag
The same concept also applies to Google Reader tags. Let us suppose you want to post specific feed items in your Twitter account but do not want to add “Star” to them. Just follow the steps mentioned below:
1. Create a unique tag in Google Reader which you will use to post feed items in your Twitter account. You can create a new tag using “Edit Tags” placed just below each feed (see image).
Create Tags in Google Reader
2. Once the tag is in place, go to “Google Reader settings” and make that tag “Public”.
view public feed of a Google reader tag
3. Copy the link of the RSS feed of the tag you just created and add it into Twitterfeed as a new service. All done!
Whenever you add that “special Tag ” in any feed item, it will be present in that public feed and Twitterfeed will pick it up and post it into your Twitter account(s).
Using the above method has a couple of advantages. First, it’s fast and easy. You don’t have to login to your Twitter account, type the title of the post and create a short URL. And secondly, I feel it’s a much better way to share posts within your network without using scheduling services like Hootsuite, which I am not a big fan of.
How creative are you with Google Reader feeds? Do you use tags, shared items or starred items to cross post articles in Twitter and Facebook?
Or you could just use the drop down SEND TO menu at the bottom of each entry and select SEND TO > TWITTER.
One can easily customise the services that appear in the SEND TO menu via SETTINGS > SEND TO
@Sparx: Yes, the send to feature is also useful but there is a small advantage with Tags. THose posts are bookmarked with tags and you can later see which of the posts were sent to the Twitter account. Thanks for the comment.
Brilliant.. thank you!