I’ve wanted to start a link blog for a while now. I’m reading nearly 200 feeds and even when I wrote at Hack-A-Day I almost never used anything I read. I just read to keep us from duplicating someone else… maintaining the freshness. I use Bloglines to read so I was thinking about using their blogging tools to publish a feed I could then use in my sidebar.
First step was widgetizing my sidebar. It’s a simple process (well, if you’re using the default theme like me). Once that’s done you can drag and drop widgets that you want to appear in your sidebar. I tried using the RSS widget only to find my host uses an old version of PHP (we’re talking vulns from 2002, but hey, $36 a year ain’t bad). Doesn’t really matter because I found out the Bloglines blog feeds would not be fun for the user. I found the widget Sideblog which lets you publish categories in the sidebar. I changed the name of the default category to “Links” and published that since none of my normal posts are ever left in that category. Now when reading articles I can use the WordPress bookmarklet to publish directly to the link blog.
The posts show up in the regular site feed with everything else. I may eventually write two separate feeds for the site, depending on how much I want to know about PHP.
Have a look in the sidebar for frequently updated links and enjoy!
SWEET!!