On Daily Link Postings January 29, 2006
Link harvest options » Slacker Manager
Bren, at Slacker Manager, posts about auto-posting del.icio.us links to his blog:
Every once in a while I turn on the feature in del.icio.us that squirts my recent bookmarks over here to the blog. I like the feature, but I prefer posts on the blog to have some context, and I’m too lazy to go back in, change the title and say more stuff about the links. So as much as I like the automatic nature of the del.icio.us posts, I don’t think I’ll do them much anymore.
There’s a bit more to it, where he points out his links are still available in a sidebar, or via RSS feed.
All good, and I understand his point. The links postings are somewhat unformatted, and can make the blog page a little cluttered, but I like having them:
- I don’t write multiple posts a day, or even a post-a-day. The primary purpose of this site is to provide a repository for my notes and such, somewhere I can readily refer back to when I need or want to. It’s the nature of these things that other people are reading it, however - something in the order of a couple of hundred a day via RSS, and six to seven hundred unique visitors a day to the site generally. So I want what I write to be meaningful - more than just re-blogging stuff (and yes, I realise this post comes close to that in it’s intro!). However, I think there’s value in showing activity on the site each day, or roughly each day. And if someone happens to find something interesting as a result of what I’ve tagged on any given day, that’s a bonus.
- That said, consider the del.icio.us postings to be my little bit of selfishness. They’re mine. (Sure, go ahead, picture me in a Gollum posture…). I subscribe to my own RSS feed, so the links postings are brought down into my copy of Outlook. That’s then indexed with the MSN Desktop tool. If del.icio.us is down - it’s happened - I’ve still got ready access to all my historical links; at most, only the last twenty-four hours of links are in jeopardy.
- He does have a point about context though; I’m sloppy about writing “commentary” into the del.icio.us entries; I’ll try and be better about that, but see my point above, regarding selfishness in this regard
So, for the forseable future, there’ll be a posting here every day with “what I tagged” the previous day - assuming I tagged anything; I do like that del.icio.us is smart enough not to generate a post if no new tags were put through on any particular day.