Balaji’s Blog

Low impact Link-blogging: Design Reboot (Part 2)

I have always had mixed feelings about linkblogging – on one hand, I read a lot and it seems natural that I would come across interesting articles that other folks might enjoy. In the back of my mind however, I think of linkblogging as slagging off from the more "real" task of writing something (semi-)coherent.

A reflection of that conflict has been how my own style of linkblogging has gone through a few iterations.

One of the very first questions I was asked shortly after I twittered about the new linkblog was simply "Why not use del.icio.us?". The answer dear reader, is that I actually was using del.icio.us for linkblogging.

It’s well hidden now, with no obvious way of getting at it, but there are over 50 posts on this blog that are just links with a little commentary – here’s the first one, and this one’s the last.

del.icio.us did seem like the answer at first – as I was browsing, I hit a button whenever I came across a link; filled in some text and by some magic it appeared on the blog.

The infatuation disappeared pretty quickly though – at first, it was just the frustration of the 255 character limit for descriptions. But on reflection, it was something deeper than that – I resented the interruption that posting to del.icio.us represented.

Skimming through the never-ending stream of info that the Web can throw at you and picking out something interesting is an art form – when you are reading north of 200 feeds as I am today, it’s pretty much a survival skill. Yet every time I found something useful, I would have to drop everything and focus on writing something meaningful about why I found this link useful – after all what use is a link without context? Do this context switch 20+ times a day and you start to feel a little ragged.

Foolhardily, I decided the answer was to hand-code a daily link dump. I would open links in individual tabs as I came across them, cull them down to a few interesting links at the end of the day and then using a combination of two firefox extensions and some Autohotkey magic, kludge together the HTML required to format the post appropriately. Not unexpectedly, this experiment didn’t last very long – I made exactly 6 linkblog-style posts using this technique before I gave up all-together.

It was only when I made the switch to RSS that I began to consider how best to start linkblogging again. My requirement was simple – I wanted a way to hit a button and share a link; no comments, no tagging, nothing. I knew right away that FeedDemon supported this through "shared clippings" but I balked at paying for a feed reader and tried to postpone the inevitable by using GreatNews.

In the end however, I switched to FeedDemon and that was when the real power of using RSS feeds for linkblogging hit me – I no longer had to provide a context. The author of each individual article had taken the time to craft an introductory paragraph that explained the article better than I ever could. If you wanted to read further, you kept scrolling or you just switched to the next article – a homage to the low-impact way in which the link itself was blogged.

Is this method without flaws? From an attention perspective – I think no, there aren’t any. I can share links with minimum effort, folks who subscribe to the linkblog feed can skim through the links easily as well.

The real problems lie in usability – HTML is being converted into RSS, back into HTML (on the blog) and finally into RSS (in the blog feed). Validation is a pipe-dream, the visual layout of the blog is often broken and some functionality simply does not work¹.

The other problem is the possibility of ads slipping into the blog – I don’t have any ads running and don’t intend to either. I worry that someday, I might share an article that comes with advertising attached and make a mockery of that claim.

Is that risk worth the reward of sharing interesting ideas quickly and without friction? My answer is a cautious yes.

1. I cannot for example, get a feed for a single category to validate and I have no way of fixing it [↩]

Goodbye del.icio.us – it was time to roll my own

Well for a long time now, I’ve been using del.icio.us as a means of blogging the various articles I read on the web. I would add a bookmark in delicious and every night, the links would appear in my blog along with my tags and descriptions – all very neat.

Except I’ve constantly been irritated by del.icio.us’s bone-headed decision to limit descriptions to 255 chars. And if like me, you like to add a little commentary, links to earlier posts and referrer info¹; the 255 character limit gets real boring – real fast.

So when I read this article on LH about getting a list of tabs from Firefox in your email; I decided it was time to make the switch.

What really helped was finding about this Firefox extension – now I could very easily find out from which site I had come when following a link and could properly add the “via” information.

So, the process works like this now:

1. Open up all the “Geek News” sites I read.
2. Ctrl+Click on a bunch of different articles
3. Some tabs are closed after a casual read-through, cause they are not worth it.
4. The good ones stay open; till all other tabs are closed.
5. Use the Send Tabs extension to get a plain text list of all the tabs²
6. Use the “How’d I get here” extension to figure out the “via” info.
7. Now the really geeky part – to convert the links into a bulleted list; add proper “via” links etc, I use Auto Hotkey and a script originally posted on LifeHacker, which I’ve personalized. Essentially this script allows me to automate all the HTML for lists, links etc so all I have to do is Cut,Paste and type a keyword.
8. Copy the whole block of HTML into Performancing and post!

I’m finally free of those irritating character limits and it hardly takes more time than the del.icio.us method. I don’t have per-link tags anymore but that’s a small price to pay.

Unfortunately, this just means there’s another item on the site redesign/cleanup list (sigh).

1. yes I know sites like Digg or MeFi hardly need any more link traffic; but still it’s just about being polite you know? [↩]
2. This is a bit screwy at work because Lotus Notes support is a bit flaky [↩]

del.icio.us redesign

It looks like del.icio.us has gone through a small redesign – the top header is now a gray background and the fonts for the entire site have changed (looks like a common serif font, but I can’t place it).

I personally think the new look is easier on the eyes.

PS: Edit – My bad. The new look was actually on account of the greasemonkey script I’m using – del.icio.us prettifier. Though irritatingly, it’s not working today. Updated the technorati tags as well

Are tag clusters on del.icio.us new?

I somehow can’t seem to recollect seeing this till now, but it’s something I wanted for a while.

When I file an article like this one, I used the tags “google” and “hacking”. I read that as “google hacking” in my mind. But when I click on “google” in my tag cloud on del.icio.us, I couldn’t see the fact that it was also tagged as “hacking”.

And I wanted to be able to see that in a cloud.

I just spotted that on del.icio.us now. Maybe it’s a question of not seeing a feature till you need one, but in any case, props to the del.icio.us team for this feature.

Infinite Loop

So I file my posts in Del.icio.us and use the Daily Del.icio.us Posts to add them to my blog. Then I have the sociable plugin that allows you to file that post in del.icio.us again.

So you could theoretically, create a bookmark in del.icio.us that was actually a bunch of links in del.icio.us itself, posted to the blog using the del.icio.us API. There’s an infinite loop in there somewhere, I just haven’t figured it out yet