Download Google Reader Articles as PDF via ‘Send To’

Inspired by FeedDemon (see #7), the Google Reader team has added some useful features in their popular web based feed reader program including a new "Send To" option that lets users share and bookmark stories directly from Google Reader.

For instance, you can now save articles on to your delicious account or send them to your Twitter stream in few clicks – select the Google Reader story that you want to share, press Shift + T (or click the "Send To" link with your mouse) and choose the social site where you want to send that story.

It’s that simple. Google Reader comes pre-loaded with links to some popular social services but if the one you use frequently is missing from that default list (e.g. Mister Wong, FriendFeed or even LinkedIn), add it manually from the settings page.

Create Your Own "Send To" Items for Google Reader

Tip #1: If you want to quickly save stories from Google Reader to your hard drive in PDF format, create a new custom link with the following settings:

Name: Save as PDF
URL: http://savepageaspdf.pdfonline.com/pdfonline/pdfonline.asp?cURL=${url}
Icon URL: http://www.adobe.com/lib/com.adobe/template/icon/pdf.gif

Tip #2: Dealing with Partial Feeds

When you use the "Email This" option inside Google Reader, the full text and images of that story are sent via email. This is great for full-text feeds but what do you do in the situation where the RSS publisher is syndicating only partial feeds? Well, here’s a workaround.

Name: Email This
URL: mailto:www@web2mail.com?subject=${url}
Icon URL: http://mail.google.com/favicon.ico

Now when you select "Email this" from the Send To menu, a request is sent to the web2mail service (see #0) – it will fetch the whole web page from the original URL and will send you the contents via email.

Tip #3: If you are planning to add multiple social sites to that Send To menu in Google Reader, wait. What you can do is add a link to any of your favorite social bookmarking widgets and that will give you access to almost every popular social site from the Google menu.

Here are the settings for addthis.com but you may even use addtoany.com or sharethis.com.

Name: Share This
URL: http://addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&url=${url}&title=${title}
Icon URL: http://shareicons.com/favicon.ico

Tip #4: Track related conversations

If you like to know how the web world has reacted to an article that you are currently reading inside Google Reader, add a new "Conversations" custom link with the following settings:

Name: Conversations
URL: http://backtweets.com/search?q=${url}
Icon URL: http://backtweets.com/favicon.ico

You may use a similar approach for tracking reactions in the blogosphere – replace BackTweets with either Technorati or Google Blog Search.