Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared is a WordPress plug-in that pulls in your shared items from Google Reader. Includes easy configuration, widget support, ability to embed in a page or post (shortcode), and caching for performance.
New version 4.0.4 updated November 21, 2009!
Download version 4.0.4 from the WordPress plug-in repository »
Description
“Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared” gets the shared items from your Google Reader account.
Want to easily share posts you recommend from other blogs? Want to share selected posts from your business partners’ news feeds or friends’ blogs? The “Recommended Reading” plug in is the easy way to do it! All you need is a free Google Reader account.
It includes an easy to use configuration panel inside the WordPress “settings” menu. From this panel you can control every aspect of the plug-in, including:
- Your Google Reader ID… or look it up dynamically with your Google username and password!
- Number of posts to show.
- Format of post dates (or hide dates).
- Option to show the source blog with link.
- How many characters from the post’s content or summary to show (including all, or none).
- Handling of links (new window, nofollow properties).
- Display of your notes.
- Advanced content output and styling when embedding on a page or post.
- A link back to your full shared items feed at Google
Use the sidebar widget, embed in a page or post with simple shortcode, or, for advanced users, call the list by a function in your template.
Precise CSS classes throughout the output (with common WordPress conventions) allows granular control over the look within templates. Powerful caching stores and compares the the feed’s provided update information, giving you fast performance with a feed that’s always up to date.
Version 4.0 is a major update that introduces dramatic changes and improvements “under the hood”. Key components, including feed loading and parsing, were rewritten to take full advantage of the latest WordPress API and to improve performance. As a result of the re-writes, 4.0 introduces dramatic performance improvements across the board, as well as PHP4 and broader host compatibility. Best practices, including a plug-in uninstall script, contextual help, and a dramatic reduction in option table rows have all been introduced. While there are no new “visible” features for your readers, significant fit and finish has been added to the plug-in configuration page.
All told, 4.0 represents a “code maturity” milestone, that will facilitate the addition of new features in the coming months. We will address any issues that result from the broader rollout of this major update quickly: please report them in the comments section on our website.
Caching Questions & Issues
Version 4.0.3 and 4.0.4 fix overly aggressive caching introduced in 4.0. Version 4.0 revamped a lot of the Recommended Reading internals; among other improvements, it makes much better use of the classes and APIs available in newer versions of WordPress. We switched from our own XML parser (that read the Google feed) to using the WordPress “fetch feed” mechanism. Apparently, its own default cache is around 12 hours. We now override that only for shared feeds with a 15 second cache.
Note that in addition to that very basic cache, we use our own smart caching to avoid parsing apart the feed when its unnecessary. There’s a lot of logic behind this, and we’ve elaborated in a longer comment below. But a lot of it revolves around checking Google’s “update” time stamp at the beginning of the feed. This works great when you add new items or remove the most recently shared item. However, we’ve since discovered that when you remove an old item, Google doesn’t actually update this time stamp (a bug, in our opinion). A simple work around if you are in the rare circumstance where you need to remove an old shared item is just to share a new one… or un-share and re-share your most recent item.
If you still have issues with caching, please let us know! We’re working hard to balance top notch performance and light overhead against instant, real time updates that could bring your site to a crawl!
Installation
- Easily install by searching for “Recommended Reading” in the “Add New” menu option under “Plugins”, or manually upload the folder `recommended-reading-google-reader-shared` to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- Configure the plugin by going to the “Rec. Reading” menu item under “Settings”.
- Add to your blog or website!
- Widget users can add it to the sidebar by going to the “Widgets” menu item under “Appearance” and adding the “Rec. Reading” widget.
- If you want to display the output on a page or post, just type `[recreading]` into the content.
- Template authors can output the list anywhere in by calling the function: `google_reader_shared()`; pass the value “true” – `google_reader_shared(true)` – to replicate shortcode output.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I set up a Google Reader account?
A: Everything you need to know: http://reader.google.com
Q: Why won’t my ID validate, even though I’m absolutely positive that it is right or it was looked up?
A: The most common reason for ID validation faillure is a bad ID! If you are certain it is valid, make certain that your shared items are set for public sharing (not private) in your settings.
Q: How do I share posts?
A: Click the “Share” button at the bottom of any post from within Google Reader.
Q: How do I make posts show only the items I shared before I published my post?
A: You can embed your shared items in pages or posts by using the shortcode: just type in “[recreading]” (sans quotes) where you want it to appear. In the “Display on page / post (shortcode)” options at the bottom of this settings page, check the “As of publish date” option to only show items shared before you published your post.
Q: I want to regularly share my latest items in my posts. Can Recommended Reading automatically show all the shared posts between the publication date of the current post and the last post that showed my shared items?
A: Yes! First, check off the “As of publish date” option (discussed in the previous question). You can check the next option, “up to last post” to do just that!
Q: Do I need to be at my computer to update my recommended reading list?
A: Nope! Since the plug in gets posts from the Google Reader shared feed, you can update your feed from any Google Reader interface that supports sharing items. You can even recommend items from your mobile phone using Google’s free mobile version or third party clients (I personally recommend Byline and MobileRSS for the iPhone).
Q: I don’t want to include my shared notes. Can I hide those?
A: Yes… mostly. Uncheck the “show notes” option to hide the notes attached to shared items. Before version 4.0, you could also skip “standalone” notes. Google Reader treated standalone notes (a rarely used feature) as shared items, not annotations. Skipping them would dramatically reduce the performance benefits introduce in version 4.0. Although we suspect this feature was rarely used, if there is interest, please let us know by leaving a comment on the plug-in support page.
Screenshots
Changelog (since 4.0)
4.0.1 - Fixes bug related to shortcode pages that don’t use the “as of publish date” feature not loading cache. Changed HTML filtering to use built in and more precise wp_kses filter instead of PHP strip_tags function.
4.0.2 – Fixed “source preface” not appearing
4.0.3 & 4.0.4 – Fix overly aggressive caching issues
Planned enhancements:
Add to page or post from the editor toolbar
Schedule a regular shortcode based post!
Override settings via parameters when called by function
Support for individual shared folders
Hi guys,
I use WP 2.7.1 on my blog and I cannot install the plugin. I always get a fatal error:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_OBJECT_OPERATOR in /home/rammsoft/public_html/mikeramm/en/wp-content/plugins/recommended-reading-google-reader-shared/googlereader.php on line 80
When I used version 1.52 the error is on line 80. When I used version 1.522 the error is on line 78. It seems like the error is caused by this line:
$urlPost = $entry->link->attributes()->href;
I don’t know PHP so any advice from you will be very helpful.
Thanks,
Mike
Mike — you’re not the first person to report that issue, but I’m having trouble replicating it. I think I may ditch the “simplexml” library I’m using now, as it seems to be problematic with different versions of PHP.
Do you have any idea what version of PHP you’re using?
I’ll send you an email… it may be helpful to experiment with the code directly on a site experiencing the problem.
Great that someone has made one of these. I’ve got a hobby of reading various blogs in the real estate investing industry to learn about stuff. At google reader i have about 20 different blogs.
Can this plugin expand to be one full page iNove Theme has a full page option with no sidebar. As my side bar is like full up already. But i also would not be able to display enough links. I would request something that acts like the google ready itself. Unless i’m overlooking something can something pull into a full page of it’s own to run similar to Google Reader?
It’s a great idea by the way and i am getting more and more blogs that i find on my hobby that i want to share with my users. So it could because a real feature main page of my blog. I’m sure lots of other blogs on various subjects would do similar.
Why don’t some blogs allow to read the full post in the reader as well. If this was over come it would be one step better then Google Reader so a plus for people to instal the plugin.
Jaffasoft,
Yes, you can create a page in WordPress that would hold your shared Google Reader items (the output from this plugin).
In a future version, we may add a short tag to let you easily do this. For now, you would have to know at least some basics of WordPress theme creation / editing.
You would need to create a new page template, and within that page template, call the function “google_reader_shared()”.
If you would like, we can do this for you. We charge $125/hr; it would probably take about 30 minutes to set this up for you, or about $63.
If you’re interested us, use the “request a quote” button or email us at web09@cmurrayconsulting.com and we can get the ball rolling.
Jake – I don’t know the version of PHP. My cPanel says “Unknown”. I will send you an email with login information to check it on my blog.
For those following the comments, Mike’s problem stemmed from PHP4. I’ve modified the code in the latest build (on the WordPress repository… will add here later) to more gracefully fail on PHP4 installs, as Mike has tested and confirmed!
From the first time I reviewed the post with my recommend posts, there’s a big blank spot above the first recommendation. Every time I look at it again after making a change to the settings, the space GROWS!! Any ideas?
Hot Rods –
Let me investigate and see if I can replicate the problem.
UPDATE – I can’t replicate this, either under the hood in the HTML or in the visual display, on my test installs. I will contact you offline for support.
Jake
Dear Jake,
I just installed this plugin on my Wordpress 2.7.1 and got the error message
“A version of PHP with the SimpleXML class is required. This is included with PHP 5 and newer.”
when I was going to view the settings. I’m running PHP 4.X.
Just wanted to let you know… do you expect to release a version that works with PHP4?
And yes – this plugin is exactly what I’ve been looking for!
Hey Aggie,
As indicated at the bottom of that long page above, I’m intending to release a PHP4 compatibility layer with enough demand. Comments like yours tell me that demand is real!
I’m hoping to have some time in the next week, but as this is a “free” project, I can’t commit to firm release dates.
If you need this for a paying project or client, and can afford a meaningful donation, we can fast track this feature for you and aim put it out by Saturday evening.
Otherwise, I’ll keep you apprised!
Alternatively, you may want to ask your host if they can switch you to PHP5. Many shared hosts can easily make the upgrade, and its unlikely that you’ll see any down side.
Hi!
Your Plugin looks very nice and but i have troubel to use it with wordpress-mu. Your Plugin use the whitelist and so its not possible to save the options. Can you add code and it should works wiht wordpress-mu. The solution can you find her: http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=7415
Thanks a lot!
Markus
Markus – thanks for the feedback!
We’ll definitely investigate and get a revision that’s compatible with WordPress MU out soon.
@Jake: That sounds great! Thank a lot!
Markus
hey this plug in looks incredible. I’ve been using google reader for about a year now and I’d love to put all my shared items on my personal website. is there a way to get the plugin to display all my shared items, including the ones I posted months ago?
Hey James,
Thanks for the feedback!
Notice the “Number of Posts” option in the settings panel? If you leave that blank, it will show all of your posts!
Probably want to avoid that in the sidebar, but if you’re using the “short code” method, this is probably fine (there’s no “paging” however, so it will just be one long page… maybe by the time we get to version 3 we’ll add paging!).
oh so it doesnt create a new word press blog post for each shared item? damn. I’d def. pay for that feature.
great plugin , just one question is there anyway to make navigation for shared posts using AJAX for example to show 5 posts per page?!
dev3k -
Thanks for the input!
Though there’s no support for paging “out of the box” right now, it’s certainly possible. Paging support (and AJAX for the widget is a great idea) is definitely on the road map, however.
If you would like to fast track this feature, please consider making a donation and stating this is your top feature.
James –
There’s not really any way to automatically create a post when you click the “share” button in Google Reader. There may be a way to check for new shared entries every time your blog is loaded, and generate a new post for each entry. However, I’d have to think about what form this takes.
I can’t say that this is high on the roadmap of priorities, but it looks like this extension may provide a path to what your looking for:
http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/
If you willing to *really* spend (we’re not talking $10) on this functionality, use the “Request Services” button or email me, and we can discuss a project.
I’m trying to setup Recomended Reading by when I try to validate my google reader id it says “There was a problem with the request.” and doesn’t work. I also get the same issue if I try to put in my gmail credentials to get the id that way. If i save the id anyways my blog doesn’t load since the php crashes, here is the error…
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in C:\inetpub\wwwroot\wp-content\plugins\recommended-reading-google-reader-shared\googlereader.php on line 55
Just wondering if you know why this is happening. Thanks.
Nino,
That error seems to indicate that you don’t have the “curl” PHP library installed!
http://us.php.net/curl
CURL lets PHP “scrape” or load pages outside of your domain. We use CURL to attempt to load your shared feed URL, and confirm that it actually exists and has some content (its used for similar purposes for the ID validation and username/password method).
Pretty much every major hosting service provides CURL preinstalled; it’s an extremely common library that enables a lot of sites (that use PHP) to do pull external data.
I suppose we could build in a check for CURL, as we do for our PHP5 XML Library, but I’m surprised to hear of someone who, apparently, is running PHP5 but doesn’t have that library.
Where are you hosting your site?
UPDATE
Looking at your WHOIS records I’m betting you’re self hosting via Dynamic DNS. Adding the CURL library for PHP should be a pretty simple matter; there’s lots of information on the web if you do some “Googling around.”
Jake,
Excellent thanks for the help. Installed cURL for PHP and it worked. Note to anyone else that comes along this make sure your PHP root is in your PATH env var.
Hi Jake – looks like a great Plug-In…here’s what I am getting during install, see below please:
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: register_setting() in /nfs/c02/h04/mnt/41287/domains/venturelinx.com/html/wp-content/plugins/recommended-reading-google-reader-shared/googlereader.php on line 44
When I delete the googlereader.php file I can access WP Admin again. I am on WP 2.6 – could this have something to do with it?
Thanks,
Spencer
Spencer,
That’s exactly the reason. The line in question is the first “register_setting” call; that’s a relatively new API call for formally registering plug-in options that is expected to be required in the next major version of WordPress (2.8) and is presently required in WordPress MU 2.7.
As the WordPress plug-in repository indicates, WordPress 2.7 or newer is required for this plug-in. I could, in theory, build some special handling in for older versions of WordPress, but I’ve chosen to build “forward”.
If at all possible, I’d encourage you to upgrade to 2.7.
You can try version 2.0 (the code at issue was introduced in 2.0.1) by using the “Older Versions” link in the repository, but it has not been tested with 2.6.
Great plugin, however i’m in the same boat with the …
“A version of PHP with the SimpleXML class is required. This is included with PHP 5 and newer.”
Looking forward to a new version for php 4, although i’m sure my server has php5, i checked earlier today …. hmmm, interesting.
It’s a great plugin, thanks.
I have a problem with codification, when the note have any accent it brokes post (and all design blog it’s afected).
Thanks for help.
[...] Google Reader Shared Items – Everybody enjoys a good “link luv” post. I personally always have good intentions, but don’t end up writing them nearly as often as I’d like. This plugin is about as close as I’ve found to a perfect lazy blogger sharing tool. When I read an interesting article in my google reader, I simply click the “share” button at the bottom, and shortly thereafter it shows up here on this blog in the sidebar. [...]
Hello,
I’ve just installed the plugin on WP 2.7.1 and PHP 5 without any error. Every time I try to configure it, it stops saying: “Please wait… confirming valid Google ID.” and nothing else occurs. The same problem using the email address alternative.
I’ve tried to set the option ‘gr_sid’ manually into the database, but that way, the WP page using the plugin never loads.
I’ve already checked the curl support. What can I do?
Thanks. It seems to be the best plugin for that purpose.
Hello again,
I sent a comment before and I have more info about it. If I wait a long time I get the message “Google Reader ID was not valid, or you have no shared items in your feed.” but you can check that I have shared items using the ID I provided to the plugin: 12922778100439013149 (http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/12922778100439013149/state/com.google/broadcast).
Thanks again.
Your close, but I dont think that you do this. Do you know anything that does?
Either with Yahoo pipes or Google reader, etc.?
Basically I want to search the news for stories on a topic say “austism and boys”, then each morning review the new RSS feed data (perferable with duplicates eliminated) that came in durning the last 24 hours and select the items that I think will be of interest to my Blog readers (you do this already). The items I select would then become the days “news” posts on my blog…..basically title, link, attribution, and a couple lines of story. It is important that these go up to the blog as posts so they can be shared, commented on, become forum topics etc. and that readers can go back in time to get “caught up”…..I’ll manage the dead links issue.
Kind of like the “Recommened Reading check up these posts from our featured partners section above”….I got excited thinking you plugin built that section, till I read the comments above and figured out it didnt. Anyone you know doing this for us Drudge wannabess.
great plugin – absolutely love it. We use it for a regular recommended reading post called tidbits (www.thinkchangeindia.org). recently I changed one of the settings (removed snippets) and when I saved changes, it republished all the posts with the [recreading] tag – but now they show the same shared items (the latest 5 shared items from Google reader and not the items that were originally shared.
You can see the issue here:
http://www.thinkchangeindia.org/tag/tidbits/
Sorry for the delayed responses, folks. I was out on medical leave for about 10 days, and have been in catch up mode for a couple of weeks. As such, donation-dependent projects have had to take a back seat. Some responses:
Neil — the plug-in simply checks for the existence the SimpleXML class, which is built into PHP5 (at least the latest versions). If the class doesn’t exist, it throws the error message. Check with your host – many hosts that “offer” PHP5 allow you to choose whether you want to run PHP4 or PHP5. Perhaps your server is set to PHP4.
Irene – strange. I’ll look into that for the next update. Are you using actual multilingual characters, or HTML entities for these characters?
El tio Emilio – it’s possible something is just failing on validation, which is the most “flakey” component, particularly since some shared hosts time out aggressively on the HTTP requests necessary to grab the ID dynamically. Try saving the settings with the provided ID, regardless of the error, and see if it works.
Greg – you can generate feeds from news searches use Google News. Just execute a search and look for the feed on the results page. Combined with the plug-in, this would allow you to quickly share news the relevant subject. The plug-in does not automatically generate new posts, though you can create a page that will hold X number of recent shared items. I suppose one could create a script with a CRON job that could automatically create a post on a regular basis. This would be a more involved project; use the “request a quote” feature if you have some budget to implement this.
Santhosh — thanks for the feedback. The plug-in always gets the X (defined) number of recent items. It’s an interesting side effect of the way the shortcode (post embedding) works that individual posts were retaining old content. I suspect WordPress must have been saving the results of the shortcode when you publish the post to the database, rather than dynamically when the post loaded. I wonder if you’re using one of the caching plug-ins? That said, your use case is an interesting and probably a common one. In a future update I may add an option that allows shortcode uses in posts to grab X number of shared items before or equal to the post publication date. If you have any budget for the project, and would like to prioritize that feature, please contact us.
[...] Recommended Reading is a Wordpress plug-in designed to display my shared items in Google Reader. It is just so simple, once I had it installed and configured, every time I share an item in Google Reader, it shows up at the top of the reading list in my sidebar – Brilliant!! [...]
i’d like to call this in a dynamic sidebar for only one section of a magazine blog, but am having trouble getting the syntax right to call the function. plugin is installed and activated, using the shortcode in the sidebar just echoes [recreading]. what exactly to i insert to call the function?
Newswriter – if you’re editing the PHP template file for the sidebar, you call it using the function “google_reader_shared()”. Shortcode only works in pages / posts.
We also provide a widget that you can add to the sidebar, if you’re using the “widgetized” sidebar.
Thanks Jake. I’ve got it working now. I used the widget in another blog and loved it, but now I’m with a magazine-style blog and only wanted RR to appear on my page, hence the individualized dynamic sidebars.
My problem now appears to be with styling. The individual posts are coming out one after another with no spacing in between — i’ve tried various things to get a little space in between the posts, but so far no luck. do you know where i might add what to make that happen?
thanks much. and i love this plugin.
newswriter – you should be able to control spacing with some CSS. There are pretty distinct styles that we’ve assigned to each piece of the output.
Glad you love the plug-in. If you need additional help, or would like us to go in and fix this for you, please use the “request a quote” button.
We also humbly ask that if the plug-in (and my answers) helped you with a paying client, that you consider a donation.
[...] Download Recommended Reading Plugin [...]
I created a page for the shared items using the shortcode. But is will only list a limited amount of items (even though in the settings I left number of post blank). I am fine with one super long page, but I would love all my shared items there. If I can’t have them all maybe the last 250? Any ideas why it is limited the number of shared items….
[...] Siamo al quarto appuntamento con gli articoli migliori della settimana dal mio Google Reader, ora automatici grazie al plugin di Wordpress Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared. [...]
[...] to the blog this weekend. On the right menu I added a list of Good Reads (fueled by the slick Google Reader Shared Items plugin). I also added (finally) my list of Daily Favorite blogs (using Jon Dyer’s Better [...]
[...] I’ve discovered a Wordpress plugin by C. Murray Consulting called “Recommended Reading: Google Reader [...]
[...] WP Greet BoxInspired by a post from Gina Trapani @ginatrapaniat Smarterware, I just installed the Google Reader Shared Items plugin for WordPress. It allows me to create a new post listing the most recent items I shared with [...]
[...] a way of passing along my shared items from Google Reader on this blog. Yesterday I came across this cool plugin which will make it easier for me to do so. I’m going to be experimenting a bit but for now, [...]
Hi Jake, great plugin, discovered it via Gina Trapani. Can’t register my google reader account, getting the same erroro message with look up and direct introduction of the google reader ID. Couldn’t find the answer here or online, any suggestions, kind regards Walter
Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in /storage/mijndomein/users/097150/public/sites/www.shockmd.com/wp-content/plugins/recommended-reading-google-reader-shared/getsid.php on line 2
Dr Shock – that error indicates that your PHP setup does not have CURL support. CURL is a widely used PHP library that let’s PHP grab external pages – in this case, your external Google Reader page.
http://us.php.net/curl
Virtually all modern hosts support the CURL library. We’ve had a couple of users report the same problem before, and it’s usually because they’re self hosting and didn’t enable CURL (see the link above for instructions, if this is the case).
If you’re not self hosting, contact your host and ask them why they don’t support the CURL library! Good luck.
a post i published on Monday with [recreading] now contains the items I shared today. this plugin is really nice as a sidebar, but is not suitable for posts (that should be static) yet.
Kelle – you’re right about the posts. When I added the short code, the immediate idea was really that someone would create a static page that would always show their latest items. It was an alternative to putting it in the sidebar.
It seems there’s a lot of interest in incremental posts featuring the last X shared items from the publication date of that post.
I’m working on version 3.0 of the plug-in in what little spare time I have right now. #1 on the feature list is support for just that. I have to decide whether I want do this on WordPress side (when a post is published, it grabs the latest shared items, and simply saves them in the post, replacing the shortcode) or whether I want to do have it dig through the Google Reader feed looking for the first item shared before the post was published.
The latter is ideal from an “ease” perspective, however, I’m not sure if Google always shares *all* the items in your feed (as opposed to, say, the last 50), and I’m also concerned about the performance implications of digging through the feed. At a minimum, I’d have to cache the results.
Long and short of it is that I’m on it!
Dear Jake,
I asked my host about the curl library, it’s not possible to use it with this hosting service they told me,alas.
Thanks for your help, I guess there’s no alternative, kind regards Walter
Hi! there can be error data in displaying notes. If i share (without my note) item with other note, it dont display actual note author, so i add this:
$gs_ns->annotation->children()->author->name (replace your preface content)
to display correct author of the note.
thanks Jake! the new “as of published date” looks to be working well for me! (i’ll update the comments i made elsewhere.)
another request: i would like the number of posts to display to be a variable passed to [recreading]. sometimes, i’d like to create a blog entry with 3 shared links while other times i might want 7. as the code is currently written, changing the number of posts to display changes *all* instances of [recreading].
Your welcome, Kelle.
And today’s your lucky day… 3.1 is out with exactly that feature, as well as a new feature letting you show everything up to the last post to use the shortcode.
In addition to considering a donation or work referral, please leave us a good rating on the plug-in repository! We have only have 2 reviews, and the lower reviewer is dragging down the score.
First of all, thank you for this plugin!
Today I updated te plugin from 2.0.1 to 3.1 and it has stopped working: the shared news don’t appear in my sidebar. I am using this plugin inserting the code google_reader_shared(); manually in my template.
I tried to reinstall the previous 2.0.1 version and it regularly works. Why this new version doesn’t function in my blog?
The issue raised by Aldo was caused by a change in the way the plug-in returned its content via shortcode and the widget to be more compliant with WordPress standards.
Version 3.1.1 fixes the problem.
I just upgraded the plugin to version 3.1.1 and it stopped working for me. I think it’s because my shared items page is at a custom URL and you’ve changed the way the plugin validates Google Reader IDs.
If you’re not familiar with custom URLs in Google Reader, look down at the bottom of the Google Reader sharing settings: “Choose a custom URL: Since you have already customized your URL for your Google profile, you can choose to use a similar URL for your Reader shared items.” You can see it discussed briefly at http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2009/07/following-liking-and-people-searching.html
The actual data that’s causing the problem:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/glen.davis <– this is my actual link
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/01978475393541252422 <– this is what the plugin is rejecting (even though it redirects to the correct link).
I am not sure on the note section. When enabling it I have to share with note but that excludes the items without notes and the nioted entries doubles, one with and one without the note. Am I doing something wrong?
Glen – I will investigate. It does validate at the ID based link… I suspect my elimination of cURL in favor of the get file contents function may not like the redirect.
Problem solved – I had allow_url_fopen disabled in php.ini
Big thanks to Jake for above and beyond the call of duty helpfulness!
Your welcome, Glen.
I’ve add a new FAQ pertaining to allow_url_fopen, and updated the plug-in to 3.1.2. If allow_url_fopen is not enabled the user will be shown a friendly / helpful message when they go to the plug-in settings page (instead of it just failing).
My host don’t enable di “fopen” url… Thank you.
While I really liked the plugin, I just deactivated it. The issues involved that disabled the use of the plugin appear more involved than I am willing to go through. I would love it if there were an opportunity to make this work as before. Thanks.
Bret – I take it you’re getting the “fopen” error message?
Well, between you and Bud and a couple of emails, it looks like some hosts (strangely) enable fopen but not cURL, and some the other way around.
I will update the plugin – probably this afternoon – to fall back to cURL if fopen is not available and cURL is.
In the meantime, you can always downgrade to 2.0.1 using the “previous versions” link on the download page.
Jake,
I was having problems getting my Google ID to validate and was getting a bit confused. I did some investigation and found that the problem was being caused by your use of offsets to pick out the ‘xml’ bit of the atom feed from Google Reader.
My particular setup (just a standard paid for host) means I hit this bug: http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=46043
I think an alternative approach would be to make a HTTP request to the URL and then check the status which is returned?
A quick test seems to give 200 for a hit, 403 will be a non-public feed stream, 400 for a mangled arg and 404 for a bad ID etc. You can probably also configure the stream context such that PHP just requests the headers and doesn’t actually download any content – not sure about that though.
The approach I actually used was to just comment out your ID check
Craig – Interesting. The thing is, file_get_contents – in my experimentation – seemed to a bit wonky in catching error / status handling. So I just limited it and looked for the “XML” a bit.
The old approach which used cURL actually did exactly what you described.
I’m working on a 3.2 update intended to be more flexible in this regard (falling back to cURL if fopen not available). I’ll try to improve the validation too.
Hi
I have just updated the plugin to 3.2 and on the frontend the date is shown as January 1, 1970.
Why this?
thank useful for me
[...] Google Reader Shared Items (WordPress Plugin) « C. Murray Consulting (tags: wordpress plugin) [...]
[...] around the web: 19 August 2009 I’m trying out a new plugin on my website today: “Google Reader Shared“. It allows me to take my Google Reader shared items and put them in a regular blog post. So [...]
Jake, thanks for this. I’m a dunderhead when it comes to a lot of the code/hosting issues, but I really like the plugin. It’s back up and running smoothly.
All – I’m working on the messed up dates issue. The erroneous behavior is inconsistent, and seemingly related to time zones. Hoping to get a fix out this evening.
[...] Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared pulls shared items from your Google Reader account for display in a sidebar widget or within pages or posts. [...]
LOVE IT! Thanks fella. You’re a genius.
PS. Great to see you giving so much support to something that cannot be your main source of income. I’m sure it won’t go unnoticed.
Nice plugin! The only think missing is a link at the bottom to take someone to the shared items page to see the REST of the shared articles! As soon as you include that, I’ll include you in my sites and seminars instead of FriendFeed. See http://e1evation.com to see how I use both…
[...] found a wonderful plugin to display my google reader shared items. It creates a great structure to easily design and allows for many options including showing [...]
One question, I like to post multiple updates per day with new links as the beat I cover is rapidly updated. I’ve encountered a regular issue.
I post a morning links, then come back in the afternoon and evening to post another. Several links I’ve added since the morning will NOT add to the evening post. When I flush the cache, these items end up in the morning post. This happens every time I’ve done multiple updates per day.
Any ideas or suggestions as to what I could do?
Thanks! I really do love the plugin as it makes this task more fun and less tedius.
Hi.
You may specify the total number of tagged entries to return using the n parameter — the default value is 20 (n=20).
Maybe like this:
$url = “http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F”.$gr_sid.”%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast?n=”.get_option(“gr_num”);
Thanks for plugin. Its very usefull.
Hi,
I cannot get my Google Reader ID to validate, and I promise you it is indeed valid and I have shared posts. My ID does not work, but if I use a couple of friend’s ID’s it does work.
Why would my ID be failing validation?
Thanks
Scott29
velocityzen – good find, will definitely incorporate that in an update.
scott29 – very strange that your friend’s IDs would work in the same install but not yours. Have you actually shared any items yet? If you save it anyways with your ID, does it work anyhow?
Yes, I have several shared items on Google Reader. If I just save my ID in the ID field, it says “Invalid” when I try to validate it. If I look it up via my gmail account/password, it says valid at first. But then when I save the page, it says that the ID is invalid. The end result is this is all I ever see in the widget:
No Google Reader feed was found with the provided ID.
Just a note the fix to my issue about the invalid ID was due to the fact that my Google Reader articles were not set to public sharing. Once this was turned on, the plugin worked great.
great plugin! is there a way to have multiple widgets so that multiple authors can have their “recommended reading” on one blog?
Pat – that’s not presently on the road map. I’d be very wary of implementing that even if we could for performance reasons (pulling in multiple external feeds)…
ok, i understand, but i didn’t mean combining these multiple feeds, but have an option to select between multiple feeds (maybe with an jquery driven tab interface or a drop down or simple links) – this shouldn’t hurt performance..
Pat – it would still have to go to Google and “retrieve” multiple external feeds, which is where the performance drain would come from.
I’m not sure how much demand there would be for this. Most organizations that need multiple authors to contribute tend to set up a google reader account for the organization, and allow multiple authors to log in and contribute.
What might be interesting is if – on the author pages – you could show an individual authors shared items.
I’ll put this on the feature request list, but can’t promise it’s a high priority. If you really want this feature, and have a meaningful budget to play with, you can certainly contract us to build such a feature.
ok, thanks, i understand. but no, unfortunately we don’t have a budget, as your plugin is used on a website for our tech related radio show, broadcasted by a non-profit FM station, so, no money, just fun
I had this working just fine and then hit the update today now the feed is not showing, if i refresh or update the post in admin it shows up once and then upon page refresh does not show. Any ideas here?
Same as Jeff with latest update, will only display feed once after each update of settings.
Nathan / Jeff – although I can’t replicate the problem, I suspect I know why it’s happening on some setups, and will roll out a small update today.
Version 4.0.1 was just released, fixing the bug Nathan and Jeff discovered.
After further testing, I was able to replicate. The problem manifested when using the shortcode output and *not* using the “as of publish date” feature.
Thanks Jake, can confirm 4.0.1 has fixed it for me.
Great plugin!
Would like to use Special Styles. Checked the box, but the CSS file is inactive. What action do you recommend?
In particular I’d like to apply bold or italic to the Notes.
Thanks.
[...] langem habe ich das Plugin “Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared” eingesetzt, mit dem ich unter Google gesammelte [...]
Hi Jake!
I just upgraded to 4.0.1 and the “Preface Source” option seems to be broken. The Source Blog is showing up but not the custom preface text (i use “By:”).
While I’m here, i would like to request a one-line option that is | in addition to the current two line formatting.
thanks!
Kelle – Good catch! We’ve uploaded a fix.
Thanks for the quick fix!
Just wanted to share that I’ve added some modifications to my theme’s custom.css to tweak the appearance of the greader list to my liking.
add spacing between items:
li.gReader-item { margin-bottom: 10px;}
italic notes (for alaJoAnn):
.gReader-notes { font-style: italic; }
source on same line as link:
.gReader-source { display: inline; }
and then i changed the preface text to ” |” . this results in a compact display of _link_ | _source_.
Hi
Nice plugin! Please tell me if it is possible to setup the refresh/cache flush period. What’s the default period, btw?
thanks
Liviu – the caching is a bit more complex than you might guess, but here goes.
If you’re not using shortcode output in combination with the “as of publish date” feature (i.e. using the widget), the plug-in retrieves a minimal version of the shared items feed and checks the Google’s last update tag. That value is converted and compared to a “last update” value stored in the plug-ins cache settings. If its newer, the cache is completely regenerated. You should never have to worry about the cache being out of sync with the live feed since its always checking the feed’s update timestamp.
You can force a refresh of that cache by simply visiting the plug-in settings page and clicking save again.
If you *are* using shortcode with the “as of publish date” feature, caching is much more aggressive. Here’s the general idea — since you only want to retrieve items shared before you published your post — and assuming you’re not going back in time to share new posts — the plug-in assumes that it can permanently cache the shared items. This is partly for performance reasons — suppose you want to retrieve items shared a year ago. Suppose – in the extreme – that it’s 1000 shared items back… that’s quite a feed to retrieve and parse through! I’m not even sure Google will allow you retrieve items that far back. The only flaw here is you might *unshare* an item you shared last week.
You can still flush the cache under this circumstance either by globally flushing the cache by updating the plug-in settings, *or* by editing the post and updating (saving) it.
The plug-in does not over a setting to refresh the cache on a schedule, but if you’re very WordPress savvy you can look at the “rr_grs_flush” function on line 120 of “googlereader.php”, and use the WordPress event scheduling functions.
[...] של הבלוג תחת הכותרת "קישורים מומלצים" בזכות התוסף Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared [...]
Hi Jake and thank you for your detailed reply. It is clearer to me now. I use the plugin as widget and unfortunately it doesn’t seem to check the google reader last update tag or something doesn’t work because today it does not show the last two shared posts. And I shared them several hours ago: first post shared 8 hours ago, 2nd post shared 5 hours ago. Still now showing in widget.
I am not using any caching plugin if that matters…
[...] A bővítmény honlapja [...]
Question I didn’t see addressed in the comments: Reader allows you to create separate feeds by tagging individual items and then publicly sharing the tag.
i.e. Google Reader Acct >Tag item ‘twitter’> Settings, Folders and Tags, Make Public> Separate Feed for all items tagged ‘twitter’. Would there be a simple hack that would allow me to separately publish shared content from multiple tags.
userid/label/twitter
userid/label/facebook
And then I could invoke the individual feed items by adding [recreading:twitter] or something.
Thanks for a very cool plug-in!
Hi,
I cannot seem to configure the widget…am constantly getting the “not configured” message when i view the page. Any ideas?
Hi
Maybe my problem is related to the date/time, since blog runs on a different time zone? just a thought…
Hello,
Seems I’m having a problem similiar to others with the plugin updating. I’m using shortcode to display items on a dedicated page. When I share an item the plugin will not update and I have to mess with the settings to get the page to update. To update the last time I changed my number of posts to be shown and that updated the page. How often does the plugin update or will I have to change the settings everytime. I’m using Wordpress 2.8.5.
This plugin looks fantastic, thank you! I would like to add my vote to request support for multiple reader accounts. I’m using WP for a family website am looking for a solution to have a separate page for each family members shared items.
All — sorry for belated responses. Very busy week, especially since I’m heading to WordCamp NYC this weekend. Unfortunately, freebies like the plug-ins always have to play second fiddle unless donations increase dramatically!
JohnH – don’t know the answer off the top of my head, but we do want to add tag support in the future.
Liviu / Adam – hmm, it seems a few people are having this issue. My best guess, without studying your configurations, is that the WordPress XML class I’m now using is doing some caching of its own. Tell me more about your configurations. It seems Liviu is using the widget, and Luke is using the shortcode (with “as of publish date” turned off?). Does it refresh after a day? Two days? Never?
In the interim, you can try downloading and install version 3.3 which didn’t use the WordPress XML fetching class, and see if that solves the problem. Here’s the direct link:
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/recommended-reading-google-reader-shared.3.3.zip
Robin – are you able to successfully validate your ID in the admin? Did you save the settings (button at the bottom of the settings page) after entering your ID? Do you have the privacy settings on your shared feed?
thank you very much for your help! Version 3.3 seem fine, it solved my problem! Now it updated instantly
I will let you know if I face any problem…
Cheers!
Liviu
For my configuration I’m using Wordpress 2.8.5. I’m using shortcode on a dedicated page. I have the “as of publish date” turned off. Number of posts I currently have 10. Changing this number is the only way to have the page refresh. For “truncate content” I have 500 and I clicked the option to show content.
I was having the problem of newly shared items not posting immediately and took your advice to go back to version 3.3 – worked. Thanks. Great plugin.
I wrote too soon. 3.3 is not updating as it should either (sometimes taking hours). I also use another program for google reader (WP Google Sharing Contents) that I use on a page so that I can provide full text and older feeds (an archive, per se) – it updates immediately (I have used them both for months and until recently, both worked fine).
All – I’ll be releasing 4.0.3 today that should fix the caching issues in the 4.0.x builds.
Hey Jake,
it appears as though I’ve lost the shared items older than Oct 17 and many of my older shared links posts are empty. I’ve updated to 4.0.3 and messed with the settings, but no change. any ideas? thanks!
I’ve installed the 4.0.3 update and the still have the same problems with caching.
Lee (and others) – there was a small oversight in the 4.0.3 code that prevented all caching instances from being fixed. That has been addressed in 4.0.4… let me know if there are still caching issues! Do keep in mind when testing that there’s still an aggressive 15 second cache (followed be a less aggressive check).
kelle – I’m not sure why old shared items would disappear. Can you tell me more about your use case? are shared items in newer posts still there? When the plug-in is updated or saved the cache is cleaned out. It should go back as far as necessary, but I wonder if Google limits their shared feed to a certain number of items…
Now it works. Thanks for the nice plugin!
Regards
Horst
[...] that I’ve enjoyed over the course of the week. This is enabled by Google Reader and the Recommended Reading Google Reader plugin. Every Sunday morning around 6:30am, I’ll be publishing a list of all the articles that [...]
Hi Jake,
i post the links in a post every couple weeks:
http://www.astrobetter.com/category/links/
on this category page you see the “excerpt” that I entered by hand. But starting with the Oct 23rd post, the links that should be generated by Rec Reading aren’t actually there. (yes, it’s gotten worse…now I only see things I shared since Oct 22).
A possible clue: I just clicked on my Shared Items in Google Reader and for a split second, the last post displayed was the Oct 22 one. But it said “Loading More Items” and then they all showed up. So I suspect something with the way the plugin queries Google.
Let me know if there’s any more debugging I can help with. my google username is kellecruz if you want to see the items i’ve shared. thanks for a great plugin!
is it possible to display items with notes only?
I’m using notes to translate some of my shared items and I’d like to only share the ones with translations on them.
it’s a great great plugin, thank u so much for writing it.
in addition, or a way to filter certain tags so only the ones with the lags will display, the others will not…
is there a way to add that in the current version..
i’ll will also investigate in some codes myself.
thanks again
[...] I’m trying out is a plugin called Recommended Reading, which looks to do just what the doctor ordered and is actively supported. I have jut two pieces of [...]
Jake, first off, I’ll chime in with the standard (but well-deserved) “great plug-in.”
I’m using this plug-in to archive my GReader shared-noted items over to my WP blog in regular daily posts, and for that purpose it seems well-suited, especially since you note an automated post facility is on the development list.
My concern, though, is with the shortcode and cacheing setup. My previous solution was using a modified version of the Digest Posts plug-in, which would actually write the Shared item links and notes into a post. Your plug-in seems to generate the contents of a post on the fly through the shortcode and from a cache of GReader items.
Which means, if I follow this, that the persistence of that data in those posts is reliant upon my using WP and the plug-in remaining in operation and the cache holding its data for the foreseeable future. If I migrated from WP, or the plug-in became unsupported or needed to be deactivated … then all those posts would just have the shortcode as their sole content, not the actual GReader info. Ditto if something funky were to happen to the original Google Reader data and how it gets pulled into the cache.
In other words, this looks to be an excellent tool for a sidebar list of recent GReader shares, or a limited-lifespan set of posts, but if I’m looking for something as persistent and archival as possible, this may not be the best fit.
Am I understanding things correctly here? Or am I missing something?
Jason – filtering the plugin output by tag is on the road map. You could use that with a tag called “translated” when the plugin “gets there.”
Dave – thanks for the feedback.
Sounds like you basically understand things correctly. All plug-ins that use shortcode process the shortcode “on the fly.” The good news is that it will stay in sync with your Google Reader feed.
As far as archiving goes, if you import your blog contents from the RSS feed, you’ll get whatever is “generated” – including this plugin’s output – not what is stored in the database.
Hi, i have a problem using this…
My ID is picked up, but when I try to save it it doesn’t remember the change’s.
When I go back the ID is empty again….I tried modifing permissions on the files in the plugin folder but that doesnt work
Any ideas ?
hey jake, any progress on figuring out what happened to my older shared items? i think it might have something to do with the new option “up to last post.” maybe the posts that were created before this option was introduced are somehow confused? just a thought…
[...] to use the "Shared Items" button at the bottom of each post in my reader.Then, via a plugin called Recommended Reading I can post links to the stories I choose to share, in a widget down there at the bottom right of my [...]
Looks like no multiuser options…
What about duplicate and install plugin with different name?
Andy – that won’t work. The function names and option fields would conflict.
[...] I’ve discovered a Wordpress plugin by C. Murray Consulting called “Recommended Reading: Google Reader [...]
The reader ID doesn’t have to be a 20 digit number anymore. Google allows “friendly” IDs now, but your plugin doesn’t allow them. The 20 digit number still works (Google redirects it to the friendly page).
Is there any way to get the posts using “[recreading]” to stick around? If I publish a post using [recreading] and if I check “as of publish date” and “up to last post” they wind up as blank posts as soon as the current one is published. It would be nice to be able to show each day’s shared items and have them accessible instead of disappearing.
Frac – it’s getting hard to keep up with the Google Reader changes! But I’ll modify the validation on that field to be more flexible in the next update.
Gregg – the older posts should definitely *not* go blank after new posts are added (and doesn’t on my test site)!! I’ll investigate. May need to check out your site to see the problem in action.
Jake,
Thanks. I have deleted the older ones after someone alerted me to what was going on. I can definitely start them again so that you can see should we need to. In the meantime, I have just set one post to [recreading items=30] (nothing set for publish date or up to last post) and then it refreshes and I change the date and repost.
Okay, I just posted today’s items having checked “publish date” and “up to last post”. Yesterday’s post is blank. You can see that here. http://www.greggmorris.com/todays-stories-2
Any ideas what might be happening? WP version is 2.9.1 (it was also happening under 2.9) and Thesis is the theme.
Thanks!
Hi there, nice plugin. However, all my previous entries with shared posts are now empty? Am I doing something wrong?
jake,
thanks for your help ..
i enter my google id> it’s validate. I save it. Feeds appears and after 2 pages i have the error message: No Google Reader feed was found with the provided ID. Please validate the ID in plug-in configuration.
when i go back to the admin, my google id has disappeared (there’s the A letter instead). i reenter my id google (Successfully validated ID!) save it.. and the problem comes again..
do you have an idea?
And again: thanks for your help !!!
Greg / Buster – I’m swamped with WordCamp Boston and billable work at the moment, but I’ll try and carve out some time late next week to investigate.
Christophe – very odd. Sounds like a conflict with another plug-in, perhaps.
Hi!
I’ve found the behavior that triggers the lost post data bug. All of my data, post to post was showing up fine after I had made my initial report on this. I went in a few minutes ago and made a change to the settings and all of the old posts, other than the one I just posted, disappeared. This is what I was doing when I originally reported this. I would play with the various settings to try to get things “just so.” In essence, a few weeks of posts just went “poof”! Doesn’t look real good on the blog with those empty posts, ya’ know?
Thanks for the update Jake. Gotta’ take care of the paying customers first for sure! I have gone to Google’s cache and retrieved the data for most of the posts since the 5th of January. I’ll enter that manually, so if you go to check out the site, and see that there’s now data, that will be why. I verified again this morning that a change to the settings (simple, detailed) will indeed nuke the data in the old posts. Hope you’re enjoying Word Camp. Ours was great.
One other item that has me confused. I’m using the shortcode with “as of publish date” and “up to last post checked”. Since yesterday’s post, there are 35 items with today’s date and another 6 items that were shared yesterday after the shortcode post. However, only the latest 20 shared items are showing. I would expect all 41 items to display. Any idea what might be causing this? Thanks!
I’ve got an interesting issue, my post is being replicated – three instances are showing up each time I sue this plug-in to create a posting.
I’m using version 4.04 of this plugin with version 2.9.1 of Wordpress.
Thanks in advance for the help.
Sorry Jake but I’d like to let people know that I’ve switched to Shared Items Post: http://www.googletutor.com/shared-items-post/
I’m really happy with it…it generates the HTML which you can then edit. More control and most importantly, NO EMPTY POSTS.
Jake, please don’t take offense at this, but no response from you in over a week, paid customers or not, sucks! If you aren’t going to support the plugin man, do everyone a favor and get rid of it. It just hosed my sidebar on the main page. I had to disable the plugin to get the sidebar back. We are entrusting our blogs to you and you aren’t delivering man. That doesn’t work. Here’s the thing that’s so frustrating, other than you being to busy to respond, and the problems with the plugin, you’ve got the best plugin out there for this in terms of Ui , etc. You seem to understand what this should look like. I’ve developed software since the middle 80s and been the president of two pretty good sized software development firms for over 20 + years and honestly, free or not, whether you feel imposed on or not, this just doesn’t work.
Gregg – I appreciate the candid feedback and I intend to support the plug-in.
The only issue I’m aware of is (as Kelle highlighted) — on *some* sites — disappearing lists on older posts when using the shortcode feature.
I’m not sure why it hosed your sidebar. This is the first time I’ve heard of an issue with the widget. I’m using it actively on my own personal site as a sidebar widget, without issue.
Can you provide any detail?
Sure. And kudos to you for not bucking up. I went to do my daily post, added a picture to the top of the post as per the usual, added [recreading], published, and bam!, sidebar gone (using thesis) on home page, shows up on all other “pages”. I understand that you are actively using it without problem from the sounds of it. I can only tell you that I wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard one of my devs say “Well, it works fine for me.”
Here are the problems I’ve encountered as listed in comments above. Change the settings and post content disappears. No matter the settings, when using the shortcode only 20 shared items appear and sometimes not even that, even though there are many more in the Google Shared Items list. The shortcode does not pick up where it left off in terms of date/time. If you post at 6 PM on one day and then post at 6 PM the next day, only the posts that are dated that second day appear in the post. Anything dated between 6PM of the first post and midnight are ignored.
Thanks for responding and thanks for listening.
Hi,
I run Word Press 2.7 with your plugin and the following error occurs:
http://www.checkdisout.com/2010/02/dadada.html
Fatal error: Call to undefined function: fetch_feed() in /homepages/41/d240792086/htdocs/wsb4884357502/wp-content/plugins/recommended-reading-google-reader-shared/googlereader.php on line 246
Can you help?
Thank you very much
Matthias
Matthias – you must be running WordPress 2.8 or newer (fetch_feed is a built in function since 2.8).
Another vote for supporting multiple author feeds. The idea I’m hoping to do is to have each author’s page display their latest shared items on Google Reader.
I imagine you can have each author input the URL of their shared items feed (from Google Reader) into their profile and have the plugin or code check for the existence of that URL in their profile (you can repurpose something like the AIM field or Jabber field or whatever), then pull it and insert it as the source of the feed when it gets called on a page.
I’ve tried doing something like this with this code:
items, 0, 7); // specify first and last item
?>
But…
1. Not sure if this does all of the fancy backend stuff your plugin does, specifically the caching and whatever. I found this code searching the internet.
2. Can’t figure out how to enable the above code to accept different feed sources based on input in the user’s profile. The idea was to repurpose the Jabber field in a user’s profile. I tried creating a $feedsource = get_the_author_meta (‘jabber’); or $feedsource = the_author_meta(‘jabber’); above the fetch_rss line, then placing $feedsource inside fetch_rss so it looks like fetch_rss($feedsource) to do this. However, I don’t actually know what I’m doing and am just looking at code bits, trying to think logically, and going with trial and error.
3. For some reason, the above code, as it is (but with the proper feed url), returns items but the output is jacked up. There’s no description and the URL of the item gets the website’s main URL attached to the end (ex. http://www.website.com/category/post-title/http://www.website.com) and the visual link also displays with the title of the item but with the name of the website attached to the end (ex. “This is the post titleWebsite Name”). Very odd.
Anyway, I doubt there’s much you can help me with here without hiring you but I guess its just food for thought that may help you further develop this plugin. Cheers!
When checking leaving do not truncate post unchecked in the short code settings and with the truncate characters set to 1000, the plugin still excludes the post images. Can you help me with this? I dont want to duplicate content by showing the entirety of shared posts, but still want the post images to be seen.
fyi, i DO have show html checked, but do NOT have only simple tags or hide images checked.
Thanks for the future help.
Jeffrey – thanks for the question. The options to enable HTML tags like images are only available if truncating is *not* enabled.
The reason for this is that the truncating code is pretty simple right now.. It simply cuts the tag free content off at the specified point. If tags were allowed, it could conceivably cut the content in the middle of an image (or other) tag and break your page.
Enabling truncating *and* tags would require a much more complex analysis of the content to avoid breaking things. Maybe in the future, but not high up on the immediate change list!
[...] looking for are “Recommended Reading.” Such delights await your gaze! Thanks to C. Murray Consulting for the [...]
Hey there, thanks for the awesome plugin.
I have been using it since some time ago, but recently it stopped working. It keeps saying `Recommended Reading: Google Reader Shared plug-in has not been configured.`. So I go to the settings and its all reseted. I configure it again and it works, then it resets again.
I didnt change anything nor installed a new plugin. It just stopped. Can you help me?
Okay, I just fixed a problem where the widget stopped publishing stories and said “No Google Reader feed was found with the provided ID. Please validate the ID in plug-in configuration.” When I went to the configuration and validated my ID it said “Google Reader ID was not valid: you have no items in your feed or do not have a public feed.”
I checked my Reader settings by clicking Settings ▼ -> Reader Settings but I couldn’t find anything wrong. What I finally figured out is that that isn’t where the Shared settings are! You have to click on Shared Items on the left side of the Reader window. Over on the right side click on Sharing Settings. This is where you change it from Protected to Public.
But that still didn’t work. Turns out you may have to scroll all the way down on that Sharing Settings window and change the settings for Custom URL to the ugly one with the number in it rather than your name.
After I did all of that it started working again. Hope other find this helpful too.
Thanks for the insight, Tim. I think several people are encountering that problem. The plugin was built before friendly sharing URLs were available, and I’m not even sure (personally) how or why one changes it to the friendly URL. It’s on my radar, and I’ll make sure the next update supports the alternative URLs.
Thanks, Tim. I tried that, but unfortunately it didn’t work for me. The plugin still isn’t displaying any new posts. I also don’t get that “Google Reader ID was not valid” message.
Geoffrey – can you send me a link to your shared feed?
Here it is: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/veritasnoctis
And the alternate link: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/00673974755220927730
Hi Jake-
Just installed your Recommended Reading plug-in today, love the concept.
However, I’m having mixed results in terms of function.
To display the Google Reader shared feed, I created a new page called “Newswire” and inserted [RecReader] as instructed.
In the preview screen, everything looks fabulous as long as I’m logged-in as “Admin”. However, once I log-out of WP, the content of my sidebar widgets get pushed down the page into the body. Very strange situation and I’m not sure how to fix it.
Any solutions would be most appreciated!
FYI, I’m running WordPress 2.9.2. with Thesis theme version 1.6.
Cheers-
NB
The way I have the blog setup is to s
Hi Noah – not sure what the issue is, but guessing it’s a styling / CSS issue with your particular theme and the output of the short code.
The fact that its works when you’re logged in makes me wonder if there’s a caching plugin getting in the way, however…
Hi Jake,
First off, what a great plugin! I’ve been using it for quite a while but have been having some trouble with it lately. It loads correctly about 60-70% of the time, but intermittently it shows the following message:
“No Google Reader feed was found with the provided ID. Please validate the ID in plug-in configuration.”
I’ve tried debugging the site (e.g. using Tim’s suggestion above and deactivating plugins) but to no avail. Has anyone had any success in pinpointing the cause?
Cheers,
Aggi