dummied. Finding somebody's Google Reader shared page

Finding somebody's Google Reader shared page

At a glance: This entry was written on May 19, 2008.; The entry prior to this is entitled A clarification.; The entry following this is entitled Not hyperlocal ... Hyper-Me.; There are 3 comments on this post.; This entry has been tagged as Recommended, examples, google.; Archives are also available.

So, after attending the Interactive Media Conference last week (and picking up an Eppy for Indy.com, natch), I found myself wanting to get a little more connected with folks out there that are doing things similar to me.

I bumped into Ryan Sholin, David Cohn and a bunch of other folks there and wanted to keep up a little better. Twitter’s a great start, but I live through NetNewsWire and it turns out Sholin has a shared Google Reader feed full of good, meaty journo-related content.

Issue is: I don’t want to use Google Reader. NetNewsWire and it’s synching to the web is the bees knees for me and I don’t want to keep another damn tab open (and I’m not on Leopard, so Fluid’s out, too).

Luckily, I figured out how to find Ryan’s shared page (and associated RSS feed).

So, for anybody else trying to hunt this sort of stuff down, here’s how I did it:

Firstly, I’m friends already with Ryan, so he shows up in my Friends’ shared items. Using Firefox and Firebug, I saw that Reader loads this url in the background when I click to see Ryan’s feed:

https://www.google.com/reader/api/0/stream/contents/user/07803237709052972366/state …

Now, I already know that my shared page url looks like this:

https://www.google.com/reader/shared/17170470741209837224

So, that mean’s Ryan’s would be:

https://www.google.com/reader/shared/07803237709052972366

In other words, the Google url structure includes the user id, which is this string of numbers in the api call:

https://www.google.com/reader/api/0/stream/contents/user/07803237709052972366/state …

Just slap that number onto the end of /reader/shared and walk away happy.

Now, a few quick caveats: I don’t know of a quick way to stumble onto somebody’s user id without being a “friend” of them already and this might be something stupidly obvious that’s already floating around the internet, but I didn’t stumble on it with a quick google.

Enjoy!

Addendum: While I don’t have Google Reader’s shared items feed for myself, I do have a Clippings feed from NNW available. It’s more than a little Rails-nerdy, but there’s also the occasional journalism-related goodness as well.