glide along

For a while now, I’ve been using the shared items feature on Google Reader.

The idea is pretty fucking good, but unfortunately, it seems to be only half way done. Once you start sharing the posts from your google reader list, they will be added to a web page and made available through a feed (the webpage created for my account is an example as good as any other…).

I would like to add a quick list to my sidebar (here at glide along) that is automatically updated as I share something on Google Reader, but I couldn’t get that to work for two reasons:

Firstly, the created feed is invalid (not compliant with the feed specifications).

Secondly, the Word Press sidebar widget supposed to do this does not support Atom feeds, only RSS. The “RSS vs. Atom” discussion has been going on for a while, however, I never found it slightly interesting and, thus, never took the time to read anything on the subject. This means I really do not know (and don’t care) what are the pros and cons of using one feed format or the other, all I know is that all major feed-related software today supports both. So should both Google Reader and the WP widget.

More than not being able to add my shared items to the sidebar, as a friend of mine pointed out, it is impossible to use Google Reader to subscribe to a Google Reader Shared Items feed… Not only the feed is broken, it is is broken in such a way that not even Google Reader itself can… err… read it………… Amazing, isn’t it? The fix I found for this specific problem is to burn the feed through FeedBurner, so if you wish to subscribe to my shared items feed, please refer to this link.

By the way, I couldn’t find anything about this on the company’s website…