Create a List of Links from Google Reader Starred Items with Powershell

Inspired by Jason Strate’s (Blog| Twitter) post “PowerShell: Download List of SQL Server MVPs”, which was inspired by John Samson’s (Blog| Twitter) post “The Best Database Administrators Automate Everything” – which also inspired me.  I decided to create a Powershell script to grab my starred items in Google Reader and format them into an HTML Page with links for my Weekly Challenges/Good Reading Posts.

The Set Up

I had an HTML template created for these pages, so I split it into three parts:

1. The portion above the Good Reading and Links – I saved this to a text file located at “c:\temp\TopTemplate.txt”
2. The Good Reading and Links
3. The portion below the Good reading and Links – I saved this to a text file located at “c:\temp\BotTemplate.txt”

I then looked at my public page for Starred Items on Google Reader.  Note this script works for any public listing on Google Reader, so I can create a Public Page and change the URL in this script and it still works.

The Code

##------------------------##
##--Reader Starred Items--##
##------------------------##
$webclient = New-Object system.net.webclient
$SourceFile = "c:\temp\Reader.txt"
$HTMLPage = "C:\temp\GoodReading.txt"
$TopTemplate = "c:\temp\TopTemplate.txt"
$BotTemplate = "c:\temp\BotTemplate.txt"
$url="http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/14135896925018987441/state/com.google/starred"
$webclient.DownloadFile($url,$SourceFile)
#Get the titles with links
$itemtitle = Select-String $SourceFile -pattern "h2 class=""item-title""" |
% {$_ -replace "<div id=""items""><div class=""item""><h2 class=""item-title""><div class="""">", ""} |
% {$_ -replace "</div></h2>", ""} |
% {$_ -replace "<div class=""clear""></div></div></div> <div class=""item""><h2 class=""item-title""><div class="""">", ""} |
% {$_ -replace "c:\\temp\\Reader\.txt:[0-9]*:", ""}
#Get the details with links
$iteminfo = Select-String $SourceFile -pattern "<div class=""item-info"">" |
% {$_ -replace "c:\\temp\\Reader\.txt:[0-9]*:<div class=""item-info"">", ""} |
% {$_ -replace "</div>", ""}
$i=0
$FinalContent = " "
foreach ($t in $itemtitle)
{$FinalContent= $FinalContent +"<li>"+ $itemtitle[$i] + " " + $iteminfo[$i]+"</li>" + "`r`n "
$i++}
$FinalContent = "<p><strong>Good Reading from the Week</strong>:</p>" + "`r`n" + "<ul>" + "`r`n" + $FinalContent + "`r`n" + "</ul>"
$TopTemp = Get-Content $TopTemplate
$BotTemp = Get-Content $BotTemplate
$FinalContent = $TopTemp + $FinalContent + $BotTemp
Set-Content $HTMLPage $FinalContent
invoke-item $HTMLPage

When the script completes, I simply update a couple of statuses and change the photo and it’s good to go!