Edit: This is an older post and after Google Reader ‘upgraded’ to be more focussed on Google+, it’s of limited use now…

This blog is powered by WordPress – one of the nice features of WordPress 2.2 is “widgets” which allow you to easily extend your blog with new features.

You’ll notice my sidebar has a list of blog posts I’ve read recently. This is generated from items I’ve marked as “shared” in Google Reader. While there are other RSS widgets, they don’t cope well with the structure of the feed directly from Google, so I wrote my own.

Installation

• Download lordelph_rss.php.gz (2Kb), gunzip it into wp-content/plugins
• Enable the plugin by clicking the “Plugins” page in WordPress and activating “LordElph’s Google Reader RSS Widget”
• Now click “Presentation” and “Widgets”
• Drag a Google Reader RSS box into your sidebar in the appropriate place
• Click the “configure” icon on the Google Reader RSS box to enter your shared items URL and other options

The widget caches its output for up to 4 hours, which keeps things nice and zippy but ensures that your blog stays reasonably up to date.

Enjoy – if you want to comment on this widget, see this blog entry.