Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

And now that I’ve helped out the rest of you who want to automatically generate posts from your del.icio.us bookmarks (with my daily post fixer plugin), I’m turning that feature off here. It was an interesting experiment, but I’ve decided that this isn’t how I want to present that information. Let’s examine the good and bad of the automatic link posts:

Pros

• Generates more content for the blog
• Provides additional exposure for the pages that you bookmark
• Creates a local backup of your del.icio.us bookmarks

Cons

• Lists of links are not as interesting as original content written by the blog author
• Clutters up the archives with lots of (potentially unrelated) links to external content
• Diverts focus to other sites instead of keeping readers at your own site

As a personal example, my wife has told me that she has been looking at my blog less since I started the automated posts. The links were things that she might be interested in looking at some other time, but they were not as engaging as articles that I wrote where I was expressing my personal opinion about a subject. If my own wife doesn’t want to visit my site, something is obviously wrong, yes? Even before she told me this, I was already considering ending this experiment. I still want to bring my bookmarks more into focus, but I don’t think that this is the way that I want to do it. I’ll eventually address the problem differently, probably when I get around to designing a new site theme.

So. Ultimately, the del.icio.us daily blog post feature was not for me — at least, not for this blog of mine. But that’s not to say that other people shouldn’t use it. Their balance of pros and cons might be different than mine.