Google RSS Sweetness

On the left of my blog page you will see a flair widget entitled “From My Aggregator”.  This is so cool, here’s how it works. 

I read my RSS feeds that I subscribe to in Google Reader, Google’s online RSS reader.  I flag posts that I particularly enjoy as “Shared”.  These posts are then re-published via a new RSS feed that points at all of the original posts.  I now have an RSS feed of my favorite blog posts from around the Internet.

The new feed now gets rendered into the control that you see on the left by some server side code at Google, which I then link to with JavaScript.  The widget is then written into the HTML of the page.

Damn this is cool.  It’s like a usable mashup.