To the blog, that is…
Since you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you have noticed that there’s suddenly a lot more content here on the blog. I have decided (for a number of reasons that I’ll go into detail on in a future post) to start consolidating all the stuff I publish online into one place.
The first stab at that means including my posts from Twitter, Pownce, and shared items from Google Reader (with notes I might make) as well as selected items from Del.icio.us. (more sources to come later)
This new strategy has benefits and drawbacks (again, details later), but the bottom line is that you may or may not want to change the way you “follow” the stuff I post here, and I wanted to quickly let you know how you can do that.
- You will notice in the top left sidebar a list of “Categories”, which now represent the different “post types” that you will see in the blog.This lists contains links you can follow to see only posts of a selected type, as well as corresponding RSS links to allow you to do the same when subscribing, if you so choose.
- Normal blog posts (like this one) will always be in the “Blog Posts” category, so you can bookmark that link or subscribe to that feed if you’re only interested in the traditional blog posts that have always been on here, and don’t want the other extra stuff. Same goes for any of those other links.
- Of course, if you want everything, then there is the default “All posts” feed, which will contain everything. Some of you may not want to stay subscribed to that though, if you already “follow” me by different means in some of those other source systems.
Hopefully this works out best for everyone in terms of making the content more accessible to all readers in a way that’s flexible enough to provide easy ways of filtering out as much or as little as you’re interested in.
In addition to the followup post explaining more about the “why”, I’ll also post more later on the “how” – meaning the technical inner-workings behind the scenes, and some of the reasoning behind the way it works from that angle as well.
Why not pull everything into another blog? Like a jaredbangs master collection. I’m doing that at here, I just haven’t posted about it since I need to adjust the theme a lot more.
Also, there are plugins that will help you hide categories from the site and rss. That way you’re not forcing everyone that subscribes to your main feed to see everything else. Example, I still pull in tweet posts but noone sees them unless they want to.
I don’t mind but when I did something like this everyone complained.
I’m putting it all here because this is the most logical place for consolidating everything. I may eventually start separate blogs for other content, but those will all be funneled into the top level domain here. Makes more sense to me.
I don’t want to hide any categories from the primary RSS feed, since that should be an accurate reflection of everything that’s posted here (which now includes all that stuff). I want it to be as prominent as all the rest of the content, both in the feeds and visually on the page itself, while still being obviously different. I think this method achieves that.
I’m not really forcing anyone to see anything, since I made it as easy as possible to subscribe (or bookmark, for non-RSSers) just the blog posts category.
This way, people who don’t know (and don’t want to know) the details of how everything is separate can just see everything, and the people who know enough about subscribing via RSS, etc. can also easily do that for only the parts they want.
You did force me to unsubscribe to your feed though.
You did force me to unsubscribe to your “blog” feed, know I have to resubscribe. Not really a big deal but you could have just created a new feed instead of forcing existing subscribers to a new type of feed.
I like the whole idea of a centralized “me”, it completely makes sense, that’s for sure.
Don’t forget to pull your flickr photos; if you start photo blogging.
You may want to update your theme so you can subscribe to the category your one through the feed detection from the browser. Otherwise people have to figure out the only way to get the feed is through that rss icon.
Re: forcing feed switching -
Sure, but there’s a tradeoff there either way. I either have to force existing people to rearrange their subscriptions if they *don’t* want everything, OR force people who might want everything to learn how to mess with their feeds, etc.
In my mind, the people who might want to use the separate feeds will generally be more knowledgeable when it comes to RSS, so they will easily be able to figure it out. Therefore, it makes more sense to have the “default” behavior suit the people who are least willing / able to mess with changing things.
Re: additional feed detection
Yeah, I might add those; We’ll see.
and then there’s the other problem where me and dan are the only people subscribed to your blog…
Can you update the feed you have registered with mugshot. Right now I see your twits and google reader stuff twice. Just the posts for your blog feed is my preference. Thank you .
Yeah, I do need to update Mugshot. I almost forgot about that.
OK, that’s done.