Send To Omnifocus from Google Reader

Last Updated on Tuesday, 25 May 2010 11:45 Written by Steve Tuesday, 25 May 2010 11:45

When I’m surfing the web or reading email, I often run across things that I don’t have time to complete now, but want to do later. It’s at times like these I “send” things to Omnifocus. I do this in many ways. Omnifocus has great built in scripting, so I have keyboard shortcuts to send things to the Omnifocus Quick Entry form from Entourage, Safari, Mailplane, etc.

When I’m on a web page, I use Nik’s URIHandler to send things directly to my reading list via a bookmarklet. It’s incredibly handy for all sorts of things–check out my example for creating a grocery list.

But most of the stuff I read comes in via Google Reader and there hasn’t been a good way for me to send a story from Google Reader to Omnifocus. A while back Google Reader added a Send To function allowing you to send information from the current story to any URL. The problem is, Omnifocus is a locally installed app–it doesn’t have URLs.

To solve this problem, I have built a very simple PHP page that Google Reader can use to Send To Omnifocus. Here’s a quick video of how it works:

First you need to install Nik’s URIHandler. It’s really easy to install and once you’ve done that, your computer will have a way to create items in Omnifocus via Javascript.

Then you need to set up Google Reader to Send To the URIHandler.

Go to Settings > Send To and create a new link

The URL looks like this (substitute your real project and context names): http://gokubi.com/ofocus.php?title=Read: ${title}&url=${url}&context=yourContextHere&project=yourProjectHere

And the image URL looks like this: http://gokubi.com/images/omnifocus-128-75×75.png

Save that and you can Send To Omnifocus right from Google Reader!

If you want to do this on your own, and not use my send to URL, the PHP script is really simple:

<?php
echo "<script language=\"JavaScript\">\n";
echo "window.location = \"x-omnifocus://parsetasks?text=" .  htmlentities($_GET['title']) . " :: " . htmlentities($_GET['project']) . " @ " . htmlentities($_GET['context']) . " // " . htmlentities($_GET['url']) . "\";\n";
echo "</script>\n";
?>

You can create as many Send To buttons as you want–put whatever you want in the title, and use different projects and contexts. It’s very flexible and easy to use.