Lee Turner

If you blog about items in the news or just general things you find in your feed reader then this little tip maybe useful for you. Google Reader has recently introduced a often requested new feature called 'Send To'. You can read the full announcement on the Google Reader Blog but the basic idea is that you can now 'send' the post you are reading to a different service:

Google Reader allows you to select a number of pre-installed service that you can send to:

Now as if this wasn't cool enough, they also allow you to add your own service by filling in a few fields with some placeholders that Google Reader will replace with the url and post title etc. Popular services such as Evernote are already providing ways to post to their service.

The obvious question that popped into my head was can you use this to post information through to your b2evolution blog and the answer to that was yes and it turns out to be really easy

So, open up Google Reader and head over to the Settings section. Once there, click on the 'Send to' link and scroll to the bottom of the page and you should see a button called 'Create a custom link'. Click on this and you will be presented with three fields that you have to fill in:

In the name field enter what you want the link to be called in your Google Reader Send to menu - "My Blog" for example and in the URL field enter the following:

http://www.url-to-your-blog.com/admin.php?ctrl=items&action=new&content=&post_url=${url}&post_title=${title}

In the Icon URL field I put the URL to the favicon that I use on my site:

http://www.yoursite.com/favicon.ico

And that's all there is to it. Click on save and you are ready to go. Now when you are reading through items in Google Reader you can select to send things through to your blog and (if you are logged in) the create post screen will be displayed with the title and the link fields pre-populated.

Best,

I have made a few updates to the frugal skin to fix a couple of bugs:

• Comments feed is now removed when feeds are turned off in the backend
• CSS update for when a blockquote is first in a post (thanks to Walter Cruz for reporting that)

If you want to update then you can download it from the Frugal Theme page.

Best,

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends..

Friendfeed provide a number of ways to display the content that you are aggregating through the Friendfeed service namely the Friendfeed badge and the Friendfeed feed widget. This plugin allows you to embed your Friendfeed badge or your Friendfeed feed widget into your blog.

The plugin comes in two parts - the first part is a widget that will allow you to embed either your badge or feed widget inside a b2evolution container (the sidebar of your blog for example). Add this widget like you would any other widget to your blog. The second part is a text renderer (something in b2evolution that will change certain text in your posts to something else) that will embed your Friendfeed feed widget into a blog post.

Download the Friendfeed Plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and install it via the Global Settings tab. Read the readme file and update your settings. Post a comment here with any questions.

Tweetmeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on twitter to determine which links are popular. Tweetmeme is able to categorize these links into categories and subcategories, making it easy to filter out the noise to find what your interested in.

Tweetmeme provide a button that you can add to your website or blog to enable you to share new content and tweet about it. The button provides a fully integrated URL shortener and the story or pages title. Each link which is posted on twitter adds one link to the link count on that story.

Features

1. NEW - You can now see the tweet stats for a configurable number of posts
2. NEW - You can now see the tweet stats for a specific post on the edit post screen
3. NEW - You can now change the URL shortner you are using
4. Allows you to easily add the Tweetmeme button to your blog posts in b2evolution
5. Allows you to choose where the button should be placed - top or bottom (or both) of your post along with positioning it to the left or right of the text.
6. Choose between the compact or normal style buttons
7. Allows you to change the source which you retweet, E.g. "RT @yourname "

More about these options can be found on the Tweetmeme button page

Download the Tweetmeme Plugin, upload it to your plugins folder and install it via the Global Settings tab. Read the readme file and update your settings. Post a comment here with any questions.

This is a port of the Frugal Wordpress Theme which is a crisp, clean and simple design. I have stayed true to as much of the original design as I could while obviously including things for the unique features of b2evolution like multiple blogs etc.

This skin is now comes in two versions - the existing b2evolution 2.4.x version that does not support the new features in the 3.x series like intro posts etc and the new b2evolution 3.x version that does support intro posts etc.

Skin settings are also now used to allow you to turn off post metadata and choose whether to display the b2evolution logo (the link back in the footer is always maintained)

Download the 2.4.x version of the Frugal skin or the 3.x version of the Frugal skin, upload it to your skins folder and install it via the Global Settings - Skins tab. Please feel free to post a comment here with any questions.