A call to action: Write Google to have them celebrate World Breastfeeding Week along with us. Love Joni Rae’s Google doodle!
Congrats to them both: This article was picked up by the Huffington Post.
After the death of Shared Items, the Note in Reader bookmarklet, and other functionalities (boo, Google), I got this idea from http://bonnyglen.tumblr.com/post/12372699010/reviving-my-tumblr to start a tumblr for the same purpose.
Tom shared this article http://brianshih.com/78073742 that has this helpful tip:
It turns out there is a way to share without +1’ing first. If you click on the top right “Share…” field on the OneGoogle bar, you can bypass the +1 button. It’s just completely undiscoverable.
And it’s true — it will share it to Google Plus without +1ing it. Unfortunately, it won’t make it show up in my Shared Items feed, which I then had set up to auto post to Facebook and Twitter, saving me multiple sharing steps. I’m sure there’s some way (right? maybe?) to get my +1 items set up this way again, but what a pain to have to redo it all from scratch.
Also, having shared items be solely in Reader, separate from the chaos of Google+, just makes sense. We’re sharing links for other readers/bloggers to enjoy. It’s not just social babbling. (And I say this as someone who’s a fan of social babbling…in its place).
Most egregious is the disappearance of my precious “Note in Reader” bookmarklet. I used to be able to share and note from the page I was reading, which didn’t have to be in Reader. I really do not need extra steps mucking up my process. It’s one reason I never use StumbleUpon — because I can never get the toolbar to work. It’s so much effort to click to an external site every time you want to notate or share an article you’re reading.
In contrast, here was the streamlined functionality before Google went in and messed it all the heck up.
I’d be reading a lovely article.
I’d click “Note in Reader” on my bookmarks bar, and up would pop a window asking for my notes on the article. If I’d highlighted a segment before pushing the bookmarklet, that section would now appear in the pop-up as well.
Once I clicked OK, the notes and link would wing their way to my FB page and Twitter, as well as landing on my Shared Items page both in Reader (for the joint pleasure there of reading and commenting on shared articles) and in the RSS feed page.
On Sundays, I could copy over those items into my Sunday Surf.
Dusts hands.
Now it’s all shot to bits, and I have to figure out a new way.
So Tumblr is my favorite try so far, because I can make it a simple reading list, try out Tumblr (I’ve been curious), and use the bookmarklet (woot). Other options are Pinterest (nice community setup and it has a functioning bookmarklet, but many articles I read are picture-less), and this plug for Delicious (which I’ve never really gotten into — I tried navigating it recently and it was confusing the snot out of me. Again).
We’ll see how Tumblr goes. It’s unfortunately not as mindlessly WYSIWYG as I’d hoped. It took some searching for me to figure out how to change the name of my blog, which, I dunno, seems like it should be obvious. I actually am rather tech-savvy, so I choose to blame Tumblr for this rather than my own stupidity.
And I still haven’t figured out how to connect it with my Facebook page. When I clicked the link to connect with Facebook, it suggested another link to click to set it to a page rather than a personal news feed, and that link was dead. Apparently it was supposed to direct me to some sort of defunct help article. Ah, well. I’ll figure it out as I go.
For now, this should help make my Sunday Surfing doable again.
