Using SimplePie to access shared items in Google Reader

This is a quick overview on how to access your shared items in Google Reader using PHP. Since Google Reader publishes your shared items to a RSS feed, we can access your feed using a PHP library called SimplePie.

You can trivially connect to your shared items feed with the following lines of code:

$feed = new SimplePie();
$feed->enable_cache(false);
 
$feed->set_feed_url($feed_url);
$feed->init();
$feed->handle_content_type();
 
$items = $feed->get_items();

We can then loop through the items and easily grab the Title, Author, and Link of the shared item.

foreach($items as $item)
{	
  $data = $item->get_item_tags( SIMPLEPIE_NAMESPACE_ATOM_10, "source" );
  $link = $data[0]['child']['http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom']['link'][0]
                  ['attribs']['']['href']; 
  $created = $data[0]['child']['http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom']['title']
                  [0]['data'];
 
  $title = $item->get_title();
  $content = "<a href=\"".$item->get_permalink()."\">".$item->get_title()
                       ."</a> (<a href=\"$link\">$created</a>)";
}

Google Reader, also, allows you to post a note to any item that you share in Google Reader. This is, also, conveniently put into the shared-item RSS Feed which we can grab using SimplePie.

$note_data = $item->get_item_tags(
                      "http://www.google.com/schemas/reader/atom/", 
                      "annotation" );
$note = $note_data[0]["child"]["http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"]
                      ["content"][0]["data"];