18 May 2011

Quick fix for Google Reader’s Tweet button

As reported on The Next Web, the New no longer supports the old method of setting the status through a query string, a vital part in many custom-made ‘tweet’ buttons. Instead, developers are encouraged to use the newly released ‘Web Intents’, which also offers more functionality. Unfortunately, this change also affects the built-in ‘Send To’ link in , as many users have complained on Twitter. Until Reader updates to take care of the issue, you can manually create a ‘Send To’ link to replace the broken one, with the following parameters:

Name: Send to New Twitter
URL: http://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=${title}&url=${url}
Icon URL: http://si0.twimg.com/images/dev/cms/intents/bird/bird_blue/bird_16_blue.png

Tweet from Google Reader with IntentsAnother option would be to switch back to ‘Old Twitter’, which seems to still accept the old tweeting method, as mentioned on the Google Reader help forum. But this is clearly not a long-term solution, since the old interface will be scrapped at some point. Personally I rarely use the ‘tweet’ button, because I have enabled Reader2Twitter that syncs my shared items with Twitter in real-time. The only exception is when I send articles to my secondary Twitter account.

11 comments:

  1. Thanks for posting this, wondered what happened.

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  2. Thanks SOOO much that fixed my problem. BTW, is there anyway to append text to the tweet you share?

    For example:

    Twitter disables Status query strings http://t.co/GXjo0pR [Postfix text]

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  3. I don't think you can append text after the URL like you want, because Google Reader only allows one text field and this is already filled with the post title.
    You could add extra text immediately after text=${title}, but you need to escape spaces - replace them with %20 - and other special characters in order for it to work with Twitter.

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  4. Thank you, this fixed me up!!! @impalass96

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  5. THANK YOU a thousand times thank you. I've been trying to figure this out for ages, and finally stumbled across this post. It works perfectly.

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  6. Thanks a lot, code worked just fine!

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  7. Awesome! Exactly what I was looking for!

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  8. Huge thanks, that was driving me bonkers.

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  9. Thanks a lot. I post this fix in my blog.

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  10. Hey thanks for posting this!

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  11. Awesome! Thanks for this, i've been searching for this answer for a while now.

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