Google Reader - How to "Send To" Remember The Milk

There's a lot of information out there.. I mean a LOT of information. A study performed by two economists (Hal Varian and Peter Lyman) from UC Berkeley, and reported on in 2003, calculated the rate of growth at 30% year on year. And that was 6 years ago!

Whether you're researching topics of interest for work or study, or just for personal edification, there is always going to be a time when you find an article of interest that you just don't have time to read properly. But you want to tag it for reading at a later time. Leveraging "Remember The Milk", my favourite GTD app, and the new Google Reader "Send To" features, you can set yourself a little reminder to come back and read the articles. The steps are pretty simple.

1) Log in to Google Reader

2) Click on the "Settings" link in the top right-hand corner, and then click on "Send To".

3) Click on the "Create a custom link" button.

4) Enter a short name for the Send-To in the Name field- I chose RTM, pick whatever works for you.

5) Enter the following URL into the URL field - http://m.rememberthemilk.com/add?name=${title}&url=${url}&due=2 weeks&priority=3&repeat=0&estimate=5 minutes&tags=research - This should all be one line. I'll explain all the field names a bit later, and how you can customise it to your liking.

6) Enter the following URL into the Icon URL field - http://www.rememberthemilk.com/img/gears/desktop_128x128.png

7) Click on the Save button, and voila! You now have a Send To that works straight into Remember The Milk!

Now, there is one little caveat, and it is this: You MUST have logged into the mobile-friendly version of Remember The Milk, otherwise the Send To link gets munted in the process.

As promised, let us break down the URL for you so that you can customise the Send To link to work better for you.

http://m.rememberthemilk.com/add - Leave this alone - this is the program that adds the reminder into Remember The Milk

?name=${title} - Google Reader supplies the Title of the blog article in this variable ${title} - best not to touch this.

&url=${url} - Google Reader supplies the URL of the blog article in this variable ${url} - best not to touch this.

&due=2 weeks - Remember The Milk is really clever, and can understand most combinations of human readable dates. I choose "2 weeks" because anything older than that is probably "old news"

&priority=3 - I picked Priority 3 as its the lowest. If you change this to 4, you will get No Priority assigned to the task.

&repeat=0 - I don't want to keep reading the same article over and over, so I set repeat to 0. If you're more interested in the comments on the article, you may want to change this to 1 or higher.

&estimate=5 minutes - How long do I reckon I need to read/digest this. I set this to 5 minutes because I like to think of ways to apply the content of the blog, or someone I know who may find it useful.

&tags=research - This tag just categorises the Send To, and allows you to group the work you're going to have to do to catch up on all that new juicy information. Enjoy! Now you have no reason to miss that great article about Widget Creation that you found!