i finally gave in—about a year after everyone else—and started using google reader. the main reason was so i could add one of those nifty "shared items" boxes to my sidebar like everyone else has. often i will find interesting articles that i want to recommend, but don't have the time or inclination to write a whole blog post about them. for months i've been coveting those shared item boxes, so today when i had a few minutes to spare, i finally set one up.

my sidebar was already pretty cluttered, so to make way for the new box, i got rid of the "greatest hits" box (nobody cares about those stories anymore anyway) and replaced it with a much-smaller "databending" box for links to my databending primer. at some point, i might also turn the "archives" and "background" boxes into drop-down lists to further cut down on space, because it's still pretty cluttered over there.

naturally, none of the default styles for the google reader clip match my design, but using the info on this page i was able to totally reformat it all to match my blog design. if you don't know javascript, though (and i admit my javascript is rusty), that page won't make much sense to you. ¶

it here. that will allow you to share articles with no feed, or share an entire article where the feed has only a clip.

just ask if something about it doesn't work as you'd expect. i use it a LOT. ¶

sweet. i knew there had to be a way to do that, but hadn't figured it out yet. ¶

one thing thats cool is that since it lets you edit the note (which you can populate by selecting text before clicking the link) you can fix relative image links, embed vid if it doesnt work, etc. super robust. ¶

nice to see ya there!

hit up empirical for my email. would love to exchange shared google reader stuff with you! ¶