Interesting Google Reader behaviour

Quite a while back I decided to try to drum up some page rank for wow.gedsguides.com by creating a few blogs. Whenever one of my characters completed an interesting quest, or quest line, as well as updating gedsguides.com I would write about it in that character's blog. The end result of course, as any seasoned blogger could have told me, was four blogs that weren't updated frequently enough to be interesting, and that still didn't cover all the WoW characters I've got.

So I've decided to amalgamate all these blogs into one new blog — the hard way. Instead of spending a couple of hours tediously cutting and pasting from one window to another, and then fiddling with the settings of each post to faithfully reproduce the date of the original, I'm going to spend a couple of days writing a python script to do the same thing programmatically.

Of course, the real objective is to kill two birds with one stone and to improve my still extremely sketchy knowledge of Python. That will then feed back into useful skills should I eventually decide to Django-ise gedsguides.com, as I'm still thinking about doing, and also for anything I might do with Google App Engine.

Anyway, along the way, I saved the xml data feed that the script was getting back from the Blogger API, and looked at it in a browser. Lots of guff, lots of urls. One url being an Atom feed of the list of all (that is, all four of) the blogs belonging to the account that I set up to publish them.

So I rather naively took that url off to Google Reader and plugged it into the Add Subscription box. I suppose I vaguely thought that Google Reader might be clever enough to add the Atom or RSS feeds for all four of those blogs at once.

Instead, it simple-mindedly read the Atom feed, containing brief descriptions of the blogs taken from their settings, and presented that as its list of "new postings".

OK, so it wasn't as clever as I thought, and I reached for the Delete button to remove the feed. But wait! I'd been thinking of Google Reader as a blog / news reader. What it really is, is a vehicle for presenting any old Atom / RSS feed!

Well I knew that Google Calendar presents an XML feed, so I copied the feed url and tried adding it as a subscription in Google Reader. Success! Seconds later I was reading my calendar entries in Google Reader!

I wonder what else you could munge into an Atom publishing format and usefully view using Google Reader? I was thinking you could use it as a cheap workflow engine: someone could subscribe to an intranet url that gave them their to-do list for the day. Of course, the rather limited list of actions that you can do using Google Reader might not suit everything: you can jump to the posting's url or open it in a new tab or window, and you can mark the posting as read. Still...

If you could take an Atom feed from forum software, say for a partiular forum, or for a particular thread that you were interested in within that forum, then you could browse new postings in Google Reader.

A few years ago I worked with a crude kind of laboratory automation software at a pharmaceutical company. If you had a bioreactor chugging away, say, under program control, that program could expose an Atom feed with a new post every time it passed a particular milestone (sterilisation, cooling, adding medium, adding nutrients, adding organism) and you could check on the progress of your culture at the same time as browsing Slashdot :)))