September 4, 2006  

2.1

Blogchores. Nothing but blogchores on this Labor Day.
Some housekeeping notes:

  • The main page has been tidied up a bit.
    • Gone is the blogroll (it’s not you, it’s me).
    • Search, feed subscriptions, and links to topics by date and by category live only on the archive page now.
    • The photo sidebar now shows the five latest Flickr pics rather than a random one.
    • The very bottom of the sidebar lists upcoming events, usually conferences I’ll be attending.
  • Comments no longer need approval. Taking a gamble on this one, but with spam mostly curbed (thanks to this) it’ll be easier. Wish I could turn trackbacks back on, though. Sigh.
  • Post titles in the title bar. I know, I know. Curb your urge to leap skyward in joy.
  • Upgrade to Movable Type 3.32. This means virtually nothing to you, the reader, but it makes things a tad easier for me. Support for tags (about time), widgets (basically scriptable includes), and tighter external feed integration (promising but very 1.0) may lead to new functionality later on.

If you’ve made it this far, you clearly care way too much about my blog so … I have a question for you (way down below). You know the marginalia links, yes? Well they are powered by del.icio.us. It couldn’t be easier for me. But there are some drawbacks. The one that most irritates is that apostrophes (single quotes) get stripped out of the feed, presumably by the Javascript required to include it. Escaping the ‘ doesn’t work. Using the numeric code for the ‘ does work but makes the actual entries on del.icio.us and associated RSS look awful. Sucking the feed in using MT’s new feed integration doesn’t include the link notes.

Witness the marginalia, denuded of the single quote (thrice)! Top is del.icio.us, bottom is the sidebar run through the Javascript shucker.

difference.jpg

I can’t abide this. Even the loss of one type of punctuation gets my dander up.

As I see it, I have three options.

  1. Live with the lack of apostrophe, losing my footing on the slippery path that leads to complete punctutaion anarchy.
  2. Use the del.icio.us blog function that posts recent additions once daily (like this). I don’t like this so much because, well, because it only happens once daily.
  3. Really drop the hammer by dumping del.icio.us and integrating links as quasi-posts right in the body, all Kottke remaindered links-like. The big advantage here is a more flexible format than linked title + short link-free description. But crap it is a lot of work to implement.

Thoughts?

2 Responses to “2.1”

  1. GC says :

    Keep the present format. I’ve found that most slippery slopes usually lead to a bottom other than the nether pits of hell that we fear. Of course, one can never tell with punctuation it might go away entirely and everything would read like ee cummings

  2. Bryce says :

    John — with the caveat that I’ve not played around with any of this, may I suggest that you try Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 product? (Horrible name, but might be a good service.) You can import your existing delicious bookmarks: http://myweb.yahoo.com/myresults/rsslinkimport?.done=http%3A%2F%2Fmyweb.yahoo.com%2Fmyresults%2Fmyresults&delicious=1
    There’s a well-documented API:
    http://developer.yahoo.com/search/myweb/index.html
    And you can display a configurable badge (I’m assuming that you can style this any ol’ way with your own CSS.)
    http://myweb.yahoo.com/myresults/badge
    Oh, and you could also jump ship from the Yahoo brands altogether and try Magnolia:
    http://ma.gnolia.com/