Read Along with Me! Google Reader Import

UPDATE (2nd July 2007): I’ve decided to remove this feature as I would much prefer to feature original content rather than republish articles written by others. I have left this post here for the benefit of those looking to achieve a similar end result to my original goal.

It’s somewhat ironic that a simple idea to save myself some time in fact ended up causing me to miss the gym, miss dinner and leave the office some four hours later than normal. The basic idea was straightforward enough - “I wonder if there’s a way to share with other people interesting articles I find on Google Reader?” I asked myself, pausing from the toil of my industrious labors. In fact, more to the point what I really wanted to know was, “I wonder if there’s a way to update my blog without writing anything myself?” Oh, the genius of sloth!

And so it was that I embarked upon a search through the starry realms of the internets, googling ’till I was nearly blind. Finally, I came upon it - WP-O-Matic! This simple Wordpress plugin will take any RSS feed and import into your site as blog entries, removing the need for any of that writing stuff. If you see an entry with the author “Automatic”, then this is an article imported by the plugin.

So how does this relate to Google Reader you may ask? Well, listen a while and all shall be revealed!

Google Reader provides you with the ability to make your shared items available via an RSS feed, which handily enough can then be imported to your blog using WP-O-Matic. Now, all you need to do in order to add an article to your blog is select an item as shared in Reader!

There are, of course, some limitations. Posts that are automatically imported might not look quite as pretty as those you write yourself, and of course readers of your blog might feel cheated by the fact that you are not writing all of your own content. But as a way to simply post interesting content to your blog, it works.