What resharing blog service do you use?

December 14, 2011 12:08 PM

What's the best way to create a re-sharing blog, now that Google Reader is gone?

I miss Google Reader's social sharing ability, mostly to be honest because I felt like I reshared really interesting things. The multiplying effect of being friends with other interesting people was nice, but not necessary [I'm aware that Hivemined is in closed beta].

What service let's me easily reshare blog posts from Google Reader, to create my own RSS feed that others can subscribe to if they'd like? I will not be writing much if any original content, and plan on making it clear that I didn't write it. What do you use for this purpose? I see people on Typepad hacking this in, with blockquoted posts and a link at the top--maybe this is ok if it's macro'd and bookmarklet'd

Sharing as it currently exists on GR is only snippets via G+. Anything less than the full post is insulting to my readers.

posted by tintexas to computers & internet (10 answers total)

Have you tried Tumblr? That's my preferred "social blog platform." Its most useful for reblogging other tumblrs, but it can also quote and link other pages with a bookmarklet.
posted by modernserf at 12:13 PM on December 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

Delicious?
posted by Consult The Oracle at 12:22 PM on December 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

The problem I found when looking for alternatives for sharing from reader is that google's API for sharing with other sites (like delicious, facebook, twitter) does not support sending anything other than the link and title of the rss item. A lot of rss feeds (mefi's included) often do not convey enough about the article in the title or link. I (and the people I used to share with) used an aggregator to avoid clicking through 4 different sites to find the real story, and presenting a whole bunch of different sites in one uniform, easily skimmable style. I think with some greasemonkey-fu, a system could be cobbled together, but I haven't seen that attempted yet (or started it myself...)

I was using G+ as an alternative, but was also disappointed to discover that it only does snippets (and even strips the hyperlinks from these snippets). I could have handled the transition to G+ if the same functionality was there.

I didn't know about Hivemined, that looks promising for the future.
posted by stobor at 12:41 PM on December 14, 2011

My friends and I have set up a wordpress blog that we autopost google reader starred items to using ifttt which provides hooks for different web services to send stuff to each other based on different events. For some magic reason, this hook manages to send the entire body of the post, not just the title. Not sure how long this will last.

The theme we use is a slightly modified version of the P2 Theme. The theme was chosen because it handles "live" conversations without having to go to the individual entry pages and displays everything in a reasonably "clean" form on the front page.

I'm hosting the site on a personal domain that I bought and pay for hosting on but nothing prevents you from just doing this for free on wordpress.com. After the Google Reader fiasco I decided that it was very important for me and my friends to have control over our shares and comments so I decided to host it myself.

Let me know if you need more detailed info on our setup.
posted by musicismath at 12:58 PM on December 14, 2011 [1 favorite]

I've been doing this with Tumblr and ifttt. I use ifttt to automatically share things I favorite on Twitter, Flickr, etc. and then manually post the cool stuff I find on Google Reader. The variety of post types on Tumblr seem to work really well for this to highlight exactly the content you want in what you're sharing. I've got it linked up in my profile if you want to see how it works out. It's been mostly tweets and photos recently, but there's some links to articles further back as well.
posted by duien at 1:31 PM on December 14, 2011

What I've done for years for my linkblog is maintain a Pinboard account (formerly, delicious) for resharing. Posting a new link to Pinboard is terribly convenient in a third party client like Reeder; even in the main web client it's pretty easy.

Tumblr is also good for this.
posted by Nelson at 2:46 PM on December 14, 2011

Ditto for duien's recommendation. Ifttt is superb, Tumblr has a lot of power under the hood and some truly creative templates. With those two in tandem you can surpass your old model. Add an automatic twitter output, or post to facebook at the same time (using ifttt) and you've tripled your output and reach
posted by 0bvious at 3:50 PM on December 14, 2011

I made a separate twitter account that I post articles I like to; you can subscribe to twitter feeds from RSS as well. I send articles them from google reader itself, or other programs using ifftt.

Why do I have to do this when it just worked before? Annoying.
posted by stratastar at 1:12 AM on December 15, 2011

I started using this Greasemonkey script to bring sharing capability back to Google Reader. It works about the same as sharing used to, except there's no way to make comments (yet?).
posted by illenion at 1:48 AM on December 15, 2011

Some folks (calling themselves the Share Bros.) who are angry over the removed sharing options are working on Hive Mined.

Before Google Reader existed, I was using Reblog(.org) by Eyebeam. The site seems to be down but maybe you can find a copy of the software. (They themselves are still using it here. I think it used PHP. Be warned, though, that even though I only had like 5 friends I was sharing stuff with, it was open to the internet, and I got angry emails from 2-3 small blog owners who were using various searches to find their stuff copied and pasted on other blogs. Even though the reblogged posts linked back to the original source, they were still not happy that their content was being reposted in full.
posted by IndigoRain at 11:15 PM on December 16, 2011 [1 favorite]