Sharing with Google Reader

I’m still toying with RSS and trying to see if and how I can make use of it. This is hardly the first time I’ve done this. I’ve never been impressed with the tools or the technology as it exists. I keep wondering if I’m missing something or if my reading methods are simply not suited to it. My inclination is to avoid all of the repetition on the web – and there’s a whole lot of that – by finding good sites and sticking with them. Like good friends, they lead you to new friends, and on it goes. You drop old sites as you begin to get overwhelmed with what you can reasonably keep up with. I suspect this is not the mindset of a an RSS junkie, who wants to keep and eye on rolling coverage or has some other motive for being more completist in his reading.

I saw Vienna on a list of Open Source Mac software and thought I would give it a try. It’s one of the better attempts at an RSS reader that I’ve seen. Most of what I’d change on it involves making it more like mainstream Mac apps. Put the toolbar on the top, add one of those show/hide toolbar buttons, and trim the edges tight (like Mail) because it takes up a lot of the screen in column view.

Once I got Vienna going not too badly, I turned back to Google Reader and grokked it a bit more than I had before. The interface isn’t as good as Vienna’s – not by a mile – but it does have that intriguing “public” button, allowing you to share stories you think might be of interest to others. Kind of like using a blog to share links, but with a lot less work. Hey! I used to do that kind of thing. Make it easier and maybe I’ll pick it up again. Trouble is, it puts the links on web page that Google creates and you can’t change that. There is another option, and that’s putting a Google Reader generated link into the already existing blog, like so:

So, what do you think? Useful? Non useful?

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It seems that WordPress’ annoying habit to refusing any and all scripts has made this feature unusable, which means I will have to find another way. In the meantime, my public page is located here. If I decide I like this, I might just place a link on the sidebar.