23rd Oct 2004
Update Your XML Feeds for Revised Miscellaneous Items of Interest Blog
Last spring I redesigned this blog. One of the features I added at that time was the “Ever-Changing Miscellaneous Items of Interest” links in the left-hand column. Very much in the spirit of Anil Dash’s Links blog (which, I just notice, he inexplicably seems to have retired a month ago??).
I don’t know whether Anil was the first to do a links-only sidebar blog-within-a-blog like that, but his was the first I’d seen and is very well known, although I now notice lots of other bloggers do the same. It’s indeed a very handy idea; sometimes you just don’t have a lot to say, are pressed for time or a link with a headline just speaks for itself (especially using a bonus mouse-over comment in the anchor tag’s optional title field, which I also copped from Anil).
What’s a bit lame is that Movable Type does not allow this kind of Remaindered Links Blog as a standard feature; neither does any other blog publishing platform that I’m aware of. Even more lame, as Anil now works at Six Apart, which produces Movable Type, although he was doing that feature before he joined the staff there.
So, like the rest of those who enable this feature, I kludged it back in March when I switched over to MT from Blogger. I did so at the time using a flaky work-around with MT categories. It worked kinda okay, but the archives were a bit screwy, and it didn’t publish right to RSS (the ultimate point of this message). So, I just asked my favorite MT jockey, Nick Aster, to straighten it out for me, and he just did so the other day. To be honest, I didn’t pay close attention to how he did so (something along the lines of creating it as a separate blog and using the tag <MTOtherBlog> and a server-side include; I’ll have him explain it in more detail, if anyone actually gives a shit).
Anyway, the real point of this post is that if you are among the rarified Bruner Blog readers who actually subscribes to the XML feed, and you are also interested in receiving the Miscellaneous Links, you’ll now need to subscribe to those separately:
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