RSS feeds have definitely changed the way we keep ourselves updated, so much that talking about a press review may actually appear anachronistic.

I’ve been an early adopter of personal tools like iGoogle and Google Reader, but I never stuck to the social aspect of it: Digg, Delicious and so forth…

Well, today I eventually found a nice and different way to share selected content from my favorite on-line sources. You can enjoy my selection in the News page of my site, and find out how to do the same within your own Wordpress blog right here…

1) First of all, of course you need to regularly browse the content Google Reader aggregates for you. I also take for granted that you’ll progressively increase the number of feeds you get content from. Anyway, every time you find something interesting and relevant for your audience, just click on either the Share or Share with note link at the bottom of the article.

Your picks will be shown in your Wordpress page, as soon as you’ll have completed the following two steps.

2) Now, look at the URL in your web browser. Google Reader identifies you by a unique ID, inserted between user%2F and %2F, like in the picture below.

3) Final step. Download the Google Reader Shared tool from Wordpress Extend and install it into your blog (by unzipping the file and copying the resulting folder into the wp-content/plugins folder of your web server). Activate it from your Wordpress back-end, then go to Settings -> Rec. Reading and insert your Google Reader ID into the proper field.

That’s it. Now you can choose whether to show your selected content within a page, by writing the word recreading between two square parenthesis in your editor, or to use the dedicated widget you’ll find in Appearance -> Widgets. Further options allow to influence the aspect of your outcome, including some CSS editing for the most advanced users.

Happy publishing!

Used to the flexible and advanced CMS Joomla, I found Wordpress an ideal tool for blogging in a quick and ready-to-go way. Just to mention one aspect, Joomla doesn’t natively support comments but requires the installation of a dedicated extension.

On the other side of the coin, Wordpress can be less supportive when you look for advanced features and settings.

I initially couldn’t view the true html code of my posts, and the built-in editor used to cut tags like <br/>. So I installed the plugin TinyMCE Advanced Editor, which gave me more flexibility and control. But I still couldn’t have a custom space between paragraphs…

Unsatisfied with some work-around solutions found out on the web, I started trying with my (improvable) CSS skills and I eventually succeeded.

Well, let’s go straight to the point. You just need to put the following lines into your Wordpress theme style.css file:

p{
padding-bottom:7px;
}

This simple instruction puts a padding of 7 pixels every time you close a paragraph with the tag </p> (which is exactly what happens when you press the enter button in the visual view). Of course 7 pixels has been my choice, but you can alter this value until satisfied.

Hope this can help!