More services for Google Reader “Send To” links

In a previous article I’ve detailed how to add a custom link to Google Reader that sends the article to the shortening service bit.ly. In the mean time I have discovered how to add other services to this great tool built in to Reader. They are probably less popular than others already mentioned on the web, but still useful to a lot of Internet users.

1. Share an article from Google Reader with your LinkedIn connections and groups:

Name: Share on LinkedIn  
URL: http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=${url}&title=${title}&ro=false&summary=${body}&source=${source}  
Icon URL: http://www.linkedin.com/favicon.ico

The parameter ‘ro’ controls whether you share the link exactly as defined by the URL (when value is ‘true’) or you go through an extra step of confirming and editing the article details (‘false’). I prefer the latter, but that’s up to you.

You may also noticed a new substitution, ${body}. It was uncovered by a commenter to the Lifehacker article about this new feature of Google Reader. Here, ${body} refers to the snippet displayed by Google Reader, not the whole article as it appears at the source. Unfortunately, using this can produce a very long URL and that may not be supported by the service. I had problems specifically with LinkedIn when the body was longer than one paragraph, text-only, so I would recommend to exclude &summary=${body} from your setup if you plan to use this link often.

2. Submit a story to Yahoo! Buzz:

Name: Buzz up!    
URL: http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzz?targetUrl=${url}    
Icon URL: http://l.yimg.com/ds/orion/1.0.9/img/badge-logo.png

3. Add a bookmark to Yahoo! Bookmarks:

Name: Yahoo! Bookmarks    
URL: http://bookmarks.yahoo.com/toolbar/savebm?opener=&u=${url}&t=${title}    
Icon URL: http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/sch/gr2/favicon.ico

4. Share a favorite on your Windows Live profile:

Name: Share on Windows Live  
URL: https://skydrive.live.com/sharefavorite.aspx/.SharedFavorites??marklet=1&url=${url}&title=${title} 
Icon URL: https://skydrive.live.com/favicon.ico

Here I have also tried to create a link for adding the article to the Windows live private favorites: https://skydrive.live.com/createfavorite.aspx/.Favorites??marklet=1&url=${url}&title=${title}. That didn’t work unfortunately, it opens the right page, but it doesn’t fill in the URL and title fields as it’s supposed to.

5. At the beginning of this month, bit.ly announced another shortening service with an even shorter URL: j.mp. And it doesn’t get any shorter than this: just 4 characters! Since it’s basically the same site only with a new URL, changing (or adding if you prefer) your “Send To” link to point to j.mp is extremely easy: simply replace bit.ly with j.mp in both fields:

Name: Shorten with j.mp  
URL: http://j.mp/?u=${url}&s=${title} 
Icon URL: http://j.mp/static/images/favicon.png

Out of curiosity, I have tested the ‘v=3’ parameter that appeared in the bit.ly custom link with different values and it didn’t have any noticeable effect. That’s why I’ve removed it now.

As some of you have noticed both in the comments to my previous article and on FriendFeed, in some cases the URL used in the custom link from Google Reader is not the original URL of the published article on the web. I suspected that the sources were feeding the items to the reader in a different way that the others. After I enabled FeedBurner for this blog’s feed, I noticed the same phenomenon with the links to this site. They now look like this: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/[…]/going-mobile.html. This confirmed my initial hunch: the different links are caused by feed tracking services, which redirect them in order to track statistics about subscribers and views.