Link Posting Strategies
April 21st, 2006 | Published in WordPress, blogging, meta | 3 Comments
I have been trying to figure out the best (and easiest) way to feature the crap i stumble on and think people need to check out. I actually keep a dated linklog of sorts in my AIM profile to entertain all the away message stalkers. That works okay, but it’s not public and i can’t add stuff if i’m not at home. And it’s a little tight on space—and completely manual. The natural extension is to do something on this site. But what? I have used “Asides” in the past, but those broke when i upgraded WordPress and not my theme. I take too long to write things because i like to use clever “headlines” for the link text instead of the page title. So i end up with a cue of bookmarks to post that just keeps piling up.
I noticed that Natalie Jost is feeding a sidebar on her homepage with some Ma.gnolia links—i assume from their Linkroll feature. And i just realized that the “Links for YYYY-MM-DD” you see everywhere are from del.icio.us’ daily link post feature.
- Some thoughts on posting links:
- Markku’s Inline Links Dilemma. He brings up questions about the relevance of links to the regular posts and overall blog content, as well as their affect on the usability of his site.
- Dougal turned off auto link posting. He cited the primary negative of link posts is they aren’t as interesting as originally written content.
- Matt’s Asides catch “everything else.” They were created for all the little stuff that wasn’t quite big-post material.
Markku’s Recent Links plugin for WordPress makes monthly archivable link lists that are separate from the regular post flow. The Asides technique uses specially formatted normal posts that remain in the normal chronology. Both Markku and Matt cited Kottke’s remaindered links as inspiration. Daily posting tools from social bookmarking services are nice and automatic—if you bookmark a link, it’ll end up on your blog—but can get cluttery. They solve the simplicity problem i run into. But i loves me some metadata, and having timestamps and comments and stuff.
This makes me wonder, if you’re just bouncing folks to other sites, wouldn’t it be easier to just send them to your del.icio.us page?
April 23rd, 2006 at 2006/04/23 05:22 (#)
For me personally, I try not to use external services for things I can achieve with what I have. When I started wp-recent-links, del.icio.us wasn’t around yet, or I wasn’t aware of it back then. But for simple link sharing needs, I think del.icio.us is a good solution.
April 25th, 2006 at 2006/04/25 17:41 (#)
Hey, thanks for the link… I do use ma.gnolia. What I like about doing the sidebar links (and it can be done with del.icio.us) is that I can make it an aside in a way. I usually comment on the sites I link to in the sidebar so I often use it like a blog post but a short one, just a note about a link I found.
August 2nd, 2008 at 2008/08/02 04:35 (#)
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