Why does the Web just keep getting cooler?
/It's not the massive changes in the Web that keep me hooked. Sure, I've jumped on just about every bandwagon so far, with the exception of MySpace. I attempted Twittering (but I'm too wordy), I friend people on Facebook and I blog about every little detail in my children's lives. These things are great, but it's the little things the Web lets me do that make me giddy. And yes, I was giddy when I saw this hack. What I found was a blog post demonstrating how to send RSS feeds to a PDF directly from Google Reader. This actually has some practical applications. During my job search, when I used The Chronicle of Higher Education RSS feeds to keep updated on job postings, I would star the jobs that looked interesting. My wife would then go into my account, look up the starred items and copy-n-paste the job details to our massive spreadsheet. This wasn't a horrible system, but it would have been much easier if I could have sent the job posting directly to a PDF for Gina to read later. This would have reduced the amount of logging in and clicking.
As a disclaimer, the end result of this RSS-to-PDF conversion is not perfect, as you can see here. The formatting is all jacked up, which makes it a little cumbersome to get to the actual story. But, this is nice for saving content on my hard drive that I think I might want to keep. The aforementioned blog post mentions several other Google Reader hacks that I may try later.