I am del.icio.us
Wednesday, 10 September, 2008
I've upped my geek quotient by finally joining del.icio.us. I don't usually like signing up for new things willy nilly—mostly because I'm lazy and don't want to spend a lot of time learning to use the new thing. But it's also because the new thing needs to be useful to me in some way. Take Twitter, for example: Ben's a Twitterer and spends his days twittering away (or should that be “tweeting”?) with other Twitterers, but he says that, for him, it acts like office banter and takes the edge off the isolation that working at home freelance brings. For me, it seems like just another thing to follow, and at the moment I can't see how it would add value to my life (other than opening up more ways to *poke* Guan). But del.icio.us, on the other hand (I'm hoping), is going to be very useful and will replace the Blinks posts that I no longer have time to do. It's a bit sad because I really enjoyed writing them and going back over the articles I'd sent to myself from the past couple of weeks, but lately I've been finding myself falling more and more behind, and so you're not getting things like this great New York Times article on why Twitter isn't catching on, this fascinating account of a couple who moved into a mall in Salon.com, or even this absolutely fascinating discussion of microblogging, ambiant awareness, and how we forge and maintain relationships in the 21st century using technology. (I'd love to blog about that but I have no time. Anyway you should go read the article—it's one of the best things I've read lately.) Del.icio.us allows me to bookmark and tag and write notes about stuff as I go. Furthermore, it allows me to share it all with you. (I don't know what you call that feeling when you see that someone else has linked to something you linked to because you linked to it; gratification? satisfaction? Anyways, as long as they include the hat tip; otherwise you just feel cheated!)
Okay, del.icio.us can do all that, but how do I integrate it with my blog? Enter FeedGrab, an Expression Engine plugin which can take feeds from elsewhere and incorporate them into your site. The result is my full text plus del.icio.us bookmarks feed. Yes, yes, having four feeds for the one blog seems a tad indulgent, but we live in an era of choice and not everyone may care. Feel free to subscribe but feel free not to; I certainly don't mind. I just apologise in advance for the weird characters which may come up on the feed due to those irritating typographical anomalies curly apostrophes and double quotes (I don't think my care factor is high enough to weed those out).
The next question is do I incorporate my del.icio.us feed on my actual blog page? Place your vote in the comments.
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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I vote yes; I miss the blink posts.
Yes please - I like the way that you always find good writing