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.
10 Comments
I think that if you want to have a link blog then ‘automatic link posting’ is for you. But if you also write original content that others might actually be interested in then you are shooting yourself in the foot. Who wants to sift through all the linkblog entries just to find your special nugget of internet goodness?
Visitors judge a website in a glance, and I know that if I happen upon a list of links, I usually leave. I can get link lists from social bookmarking services that are better than the average joe blogger. Good job on realising that link lists make your blog become wallpaper-ish, no one will see it.
I would recommend checking out the del.icio.us linkroll feature. I use it on my blog and just call it my “link blog“. It works pretty good if you ask me. I had the same problems that you mention with the daily post feature.
Yeah, it can get pretty sparse if I’m not otherwise posting, to be sure. But I figure that, for me, the stuff I link to is just as important as the other content on the Weblog where I push it. But then I am not a normal case, am I?
[Dougal, like an idiot I didn't bother to check the calendar for when Easter is ... so no hockey on Saturday. :(]
something to consider would be to de-emphasize you link posts using css so your site viewers can easilt discern a list of links from your original content. just an idea for anyone who is using it.
Matt Walters’ suggestion’s a good one. (You can also roll your own Javascript starting with the info at http://del.icio.us/help/json .)
Another approach is Bill Rawlinson’s excellent feedList plugin for WordPress, which allows you to display the headlines and descriptions from any RSS feed. I have it as a block in my sidebar (but just on the main page… I’m trying to avoid sidebarrhea on the inside pages).
Another problem is that it highlights how long it’s been between “real” posts.
I’m working on integrating a linkblog into my mother’s site, And it’s doing my head in.
I mean if you put it in the sidebar or a separate page it becomes marginalized, Both attention and RSS wise.
There should be a elegant solution to this. But if there is I can’t find it.
I use a separate blog for my links, links and information that I would like to save for future reference, named Ctrl-S.
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[...] Well, del.icio.us apparently added the ability for blog authors to automatically add their daily links to their blogs in an autmated fashion via an XMLRPC interface. I've subscribed to this service, so you will soon start seeing posts comprised entirely of the links I added to my del.icio.us account on that particular day - the first run should be posted some time around 5pm EDT today. I'd appreciate everyone's feedback on this feature, as some have already expressed their doubts as to the efficacy of this procedure. It's worth a try, though, in my opinion. [...]
[...] Dougal’s recent decision to turn off automatic link posting has got me thinking: do readers really read the links I post? My recent links plugin used to be just a link sharing module displayed on my homepage, but recent developments has turned it into something very much similar to Kottke’s remaindered links, which in by no coincidence was the original inspiration for the plugin. [...]
[...] Dougal turned off auto link posting. He cited the primary negative of link posts is they aren’t as interesting as originally written content. [...]
[...] Por supuesto, esto no se trata solamente de una discusión reducida a este blog, sino que espero escuchar su opinión sobre esta cuestión en general: la inclusión de enlaces en los canales de sindicación de un weblog ¿es beneficiosa para los lectores de éste?, ¿es beneficiosa para el desarrollo del mismo blog?, ¿se convierte en una excusa para postear con menos regularidad?, ¿llega a molestar a los lectores? Estoy seguro de que muchos de quienes estarán leyendo esto no solamente leen blogs sino también escriben en alguno por allÃ, por lo que será sumamente interesante descubrir su punto de vista desde ambas posiciones. Hace algunos dÃas yo mismo publiqué un artÃculo en el que revisaba cómo publicar tus enlaces de del.icio.us en tu blog, pero tras leer la reflexión de Douglas Campbell sobre la publicación automática de enlaces, he llegado a las mismas conclusiones que él [traduzo sus “pros” y sus “contras”]: [...]
[...] as with my daily del.icio.us link posting experiment in the past, I have decided to discontinue my automated daily Twitter summary. I will [...]