SweetMaps

To plant Google Reader “shared items” in my blog, second sidebar (”News clips”), I followed the advice on this website. Here’s what sherifmansour said: “Jump onto Google Reader and click on your ‘Shared Items’ link. Then select to put a clip of shared items on your website. All this does is give you some JavaScript code to dump in your WordPress sidebar.php or your footer.php for whatever template you using. Edit your desired template file and paste it in! Easy as that. I made it look at bit more ’seamless’ by just changing the settings on it to use no color scheme. And then created a CSS style so that it matches that in my sidebar.”
Sounds like gobbledygook until you try it, and astonishingly it works.

RSS stands for really simple syndication, and all blogs produce RSS feeds. The moment you become keenly interested in blogs, you will learn about this, because it is the way you find out if someone has added something to their blog (which they mostly do every day or so). You can quickly scan these changes in summary form, read in detail, delete, or share with others on your own website. If you have IE7 (maybe also 6), you have a tab in your “favorites center” labeled “feeds”. You can use “Tools, Feed Discovery” to find out if a website has RSS, and if it does, you can “subscribe”. Believe me, you have to really want to do this, to do this!

It took a ridiculously long to figure this out, though I knew it was possible from other blogs (Nederkaart), so I hereby document this.  Adding the links was done (there may be other ways) through the Wordpress Presentation -> Theme Editor ->, selecting the “sidebar.php” file and inserting code as below at the bottom of the lsidebar division.  The sort order, count, and title can be adjusted.  Only “shared items” appear.

<script type=”text/javascript” src= “http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/Sweetmaps/BlogsAndNewsletters title=”Map /GIS Blogs”;sort=alpha;count=50″></script><noscript><a href=”http://del.icio.us/Sweetmaps/BlogsAndNewsletters” mce_href=”http://del.icio.us/Sweetmaps/BlogsAndNewsletters”>Map and GIS Blogs</a></noscript>

At some point the code changed… this seems to work (2/17/2008) 

<div id=”blogsandnewsletters” class=”widget sb-html”><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/Sweetmaps/BlogsAndNewsletters?count=50;title=Blogs and Newsletters;sort=alpha”></script>
<noscript><a href=”http://del.icio.us/Sweetmaps/BlogsAndNewsletters”>

BlogsAndNewsletters</a></noscript></div>