Selective web resyndication
So for a few days prior to restarting this journal, I was considering what to do with it. How to approach it. Or even if I wanted to use this one or start a new one somewhere else -- somewhere that I can write the code myself.
*drool*
Sorry, got distracted there for a sec. So I decided that since I don't have the code fully ready and handy, I'll just keep this one up for now. One thing I realized that I wanted to do, though, is related to reposting other people's content. See, sometimes I want to write my own content, but sometimes I just want to call my friends' attention to some intriguing content that someone else has posted. Take yesterday's Hutton/Frew post for instance. There's a fundamental difference between that -- where I just post a link to other people's content -- and yesterday's Commonwealth Club post -- where I actually babble a bit in my own words. The difference is that my Hutton/Frew post didn't add any content. It existed solely to point to other content.
There are enough pointers to content on the web, and often not enough actual content.
Not that there's a problem with posting a quick "Hey, you guys might want to check out this link" post. Far from it. Thing is, the Atom syndication format has a nifty way of thinking of those kinds of reposts. RSS does, too, but like most things in RSS, Atom does it better. I ran into Atom's way of reposting content when I was working on some code to syndicate the sehellenes.org site news.
See, every Atom feed (and most RSS feeds too, truth be told) gives each entry its own magical unique id. If I'm posting my own content, it'll get its own article id that other people -- well, programs mostly -- can reference and toss around. This post has one. Each of yesterday's posts has one. The article I referenced yesterday could have one if it were syndicated (we'll gloss over the fact that it's not).
One of the results of each post having its own unique id is that I could technically pick up a post from one blog and paste it directly into another blog, assuming I can post to the latter blog in the first place. I could take Hutton's article (again, glossing over the fact that it's not a blog post) and just stick it directly into my blog. In fact, I could make a whole blog of nothing but other people's blog posts that I think are interesting. And it would all be right there in front of you like any other feed, not in short content-less posts with links to the meat.
As I'm writing it out here, it feels like I'm not conveying very well how damned nifty this is. And not just from a tech-geek standpoint, either, but from a pure ease of information sharing perspective. It's damned clean. And I want to do it. I can't here on LJ, I'm pretty sure. But when I get around to coding up my own blog software, it will happen. And it will be much yayness.
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: reposts -> repeats)
*drool*
Sorry, got distracted there for a sec. So I decided that since I don't have the code fully ready and handy, I'll just keep this one up for now. One thing I realized that I wanted to do, though, is related to reposting other people's content. See, sometimes I want to write my own content, but sometimes I just want to call my friends' attention to some intriguing content that someone else has posted. Take yesterday's Hutton/Frew post for instance. There's a fundamental difference between that -- where I just post a link to other people's content -- and yesterday's Commonwealth Club post -- where I actually babble a bit in my own words. The difference is that my Hutton/Frew post didn't add any content. It existed solely to point to other content.
There are enough pointers to content on the web, and often not enough actual content.
Not that there's a problem with posting a quick "Hey, you guys might want to check out this link" post. Far from it. Thing is, the Atom syndication format has a nifty way of thinking of those kinds of reposts. RSS does, too, but like most things in RSS, Atom does it better. I ran into Atom's way of reposting content when I was working on some code to syndicate the sehellenes.org site news.
See, every Atom feed (and most RSS feeds too, truth be told) gives each entry its own magical unique id. If I'm posting my own content, it'll get its own article id that other people -- well, programs mostly -- can reference and toss around. This post has one. Each of yesterday's posts has one. The article I referenced yesterday could have one if it were syndicated (we'll gloss over the fact that it's not).
One of the results of each post having its own unique id is that I could technically pick up a post from one blog and paste it directly into another blog, assuming I can post to the latter blog in the first place. I could take Hutton's article (again, glossing over the fact that it's not a blog post) and just stick it directly into my blog. In fact, I could make a whole blog of nothing but other people's blog posts that I think are interesting. And it would all be right there in front of you like any other feed, not in short content-less posts with links to the meat.
As I'm writing it out here, it feels like I'm not conveying very well how damned nifty this is. And not just from a tech-geek standpoint, either, but from a pure ease of information sharing perspective. It's damned clean. And I want to do it. I can't here on LJ, I'm pretty sure. But when I get around to coding up my own blog software, it will happen. And it will be much yayness.
(LJ Spellchecker Genius of the Day: reposts -> repeats)