OMNINOGGIN

You guys have probably noticed [and hopefully found useful] my “Weekend Links” series that I post at the end of every week.  In this post, I would like to share my method of doing these posts quickly and efficiently.

Problem

I want to share my Google Reader shared items on a weekly links posts.  Generate these weekly links posts manually takes a lot of time.  Postalicious lets you do this all automatically, but the newer version of Postalicious was buggy for me when I tried it (2.5rc4 at the time).  Postalicious version 2.0rc6 has an option for you to use Google Reader, but this option is grayed out by default unless you overwrite one of the core WordPress files (rss.php).

Solution

I used version 2.0rc6, and got around modifying the core WordPress file by feeding my Google Reader feed through Yahoo! Pipes and then back to Postalicious.  Let’s go through the setup step by step.

Google Reader Setup

1. Log into your Google Reader account and you should be presented with your overview page.
2. Select the “Shared Items” folder on the left hand side navigation.
   
3. Click the link to bring you to your public page.
   
4. Grab the “Atom Feed” URL from the right hand side of the page.
   
5. Remember this Atom Feed URL as you will use it in the next step.

Yahoo Pipes Setup

1. Go to my Google Reader to Postalicious 2.0rc6 Yahoo! Pipes.
2. Enter the Google Reader Atom Feed URL you found in the previous section, run the pipe, then grab the RSS feed from the “Get as RSS” link.
   
3. Remember this RSS URL as you will use it in the next step.

Postalicious Setup

1. Download and activate the Postalicious WordPress plugin.
2. Go to your Postalicious settings page and configure the plugin to use Yahoo! Pipes with the RSS URL from the previous step.
   
3. I also recommend looking at other possible configurations of the plugin.  For example, I highly recommend that you select “Post as drafts”.  That way you get a chance to review and modify the post before it gets published.

Weekly Routine

1. Now whenever I’m reading articles in Google Reader, I just hit the “Share” button below the article to include the post into my upcoming “Weekend Links” post.
   
2. At the end of the week, I just open the draft post created by Postalicious for review, tagging, and publishing.
   

Conclusion

I love that I am able to automatically generate a weekly top related links post and not spend any extra time than I already do when reading through articles in my niche.  Please comment to let me know if this method works for you.  Also please let me know if you have a more streamlined way of achieving this same task.  I would love to experiment with it.