Google reader is a nice way to have all your RSS feeds in one place.   They even have a way to share an interesting article you want with other people, even friends.  I found this good, but wanted a better way to share to specific friends that would not be hard to manage.  I’ll show you a neat way to share articles with different people so they have their own customized view.

You first have to tag an article to start.  So just tag any article and call it something familiar that you’ll remember.  For this example I’m going to call it “eric” (I like just creating tags the name of my friends so it’s easy to remember).  Now you have a new tag called “eric“.  You want to make that tag public.  You’ll need to go into your Settings page, then Folders and Tags.  On that page you’ll see all your tags, find the “eric” tag and click on the icon to the left of the word private.  This will change that tag to public.  On the same line now to the right of it, you’ll see a view public page link.  You can click on that.  This is the page that you’d give to your friend.  You can either give them the public HTML page, or the RSS feed for it.  Now all that you need to do is just tag any articles with your “eric” tag, and your friend will see them.

Something great too, is the Notes area of Google Reader.  If you access your Notes, then can then drag the link they give you to share anything on the web.   When you do that, just click on your Note in Reader link, add a note if you’d like, then click on the Add tags to give it the “eric” tag of your friend.  You can un-check the “Add to shared items” even.

If you have multiple friends you can seperate the tags with a comma to share an article to multiple people.

I have also just used the Note feature to bookmark websites to go back to later.  It gives me the opportunity to search for something I’ve been to with the search feature in Google Reader.

This does make your page is public, so anyone can view it that has this special public page, just keep that in mind.

I’ve found this a lot easier to share out different articles to friends this way, and the Notes feature allows me to share any web page I find.

Have any buddies on you AIM list that set their status to invisible? If you use iChat in OSX 10.4 you can’t get them to show up in your list. (iChat in 10.5 lets you view “offline buddies” so this isn’t a problem.) Drag the bookmarklet below to your bookmark bar.

AIM

(This won’t work if you’re using an RSS reader. Go to the posting to do it.)

Now click the bookmarklet and enter the screenname to open a chat window.