Automatic blog posts from your Google Reader Shared items
September 9, 2007You may notice every once in a while I have a post titled “items from” and some date, with the content being some (hopefully) interesting items I’ve read on the web that day. Creating that post looks like a simple matter of manually creating a new post, copying and pasting the title and a summary, then adding some formatting and publishing. While that isn’t too hard, even easier would be if you could just share interesting items in your Google Reader (using the “Share” link) during the day and have them magically appear later that night in your blog.
Below is a Ruby script I wrote that does just that. It consumes an Atom feed of your Google Reader Shared Items, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface. You can run this manually, or schedule it to run at a specific time as a cron job. Note that this does not rely on inserting the post directly into the WordPress SQL tables as I’ve seen other WP plug-ins do - that requires you to have access to the WP database, which you don’t if (like me) your blog is hosted at wordpress.com.
This whole process takes less than 100 lines of Ruby, including lot’s of comments. What this shows is how easy it is to “glue” together different web services to accomplish a useful goal when all the players use well documented web standards. It also shows how simple, yet powerful, a dynamic scripting language designed for the web can be.
The script can be found here. Read the comments at the very top for examples of how to run it. Make sure you edit your personal settings in the “Stuff you should change” section.
Later, I’ll show you a similar script that automatically creates blog posts from your del.icio.us links.
[...] 2007 Similar to the way I wanted to share my Google Reader Shared items on my blog (that post is here), I also decided I wanted to share some of my del.icio.us bookmarks. If you aren’t familiar [...]
[...] Automatic blog posts from your Google Reader Shared items « Tzetze Fly - by Dan Woolley - Below is a Ruby script I wrote that does just that. It consumes an Atom feed of your Google Reader Shared Items, formats them, and automatically posts them to your WordPress blog using their XML-RPC interface [...]
where can I get this script?
@Warner - The post has a link to the script - ‘The script can be found here’ - click on the word ‘here’ and you’ll see the script.
Hi,
I just tried your script and it’s working perfectly.
Very nicely done and thanks for sharing.
P.S. due to my noob-ness I was getting an hostname error, until I removed the http:// part from the blogurl. Maybe other non-coders will find this info useful.
Thanks again!