As part of my current Facebook hiatus, I have gone back to something I really enjoyed before I started spending far too much time on the social media site: reading blogs via an RSS reader and sharing my favorite stories with others.
My current RSS reader of choice is Fever, a self-hosted feed reader with a nice web and mobile web experience. Reeder 2 on iOS also supports Fever for those that like using an app instead of the mobile web interface. For me, using a reader makes it a lot easier to keep up with important sites and news outlets without having to filter through the noise of Twitter or Facebook. I also like that I have access to Fever’s database because I host it.
Fever includes sharing options within the web interface for Email, Delicious, Instapaper, and Twitter, but that still does not provide the ability for me to keep track of every link I have shared like Google Reader used to do. That is where a new web application created by Dave Winer comes in to play. Radio3 is a linkblogging tool that maintains an RSS feed of all shared links while providing the ability to automatically post to Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress. The RSS feed makes it possible to keep track of my shared links in a standard format that I will be able to read well into the future.
Radio3 includes a handy bookmarklet that makes it easy to share the current browser window, but what if Fever and Radio3 could work together so I did not have to leave my feed reader? Well, they can! Fever has the ability to add sharing options as long as the service provides a URL to add new items, and Radio3 does just that.
To add Radio3 as a sharing option in Fever, perform the following steps:
1. Select Preferences from the Fever menu.
2. Click the Sharing tab.
3. Click the plus (+) button to add a new service.
4. Enter Radio3 in the Service Name field.
5. Enter the following in the Service URL field:
http://radio3.io/?link=%u&title=%t&description=%t
%u represents the site URL, and %t represents the site title. Fever also has a shortcut to include the excerpt that I suppose could be used for the description portion of the Radio3 URL, but I have chosen to use the title which seems to be the default behavior of the bookmarklet when no text is selected in the browser.
6. Enter r in the Key field.
7. Click Save.
That’s all there is to it. Radio3 can now be selected as one of the sharing options directly in Fever.
This is a great example of two web apps working together to make reading and sharing a whole lot more enjoyable.
