I made a bunch of improvements to my Daily Links, with more on the way. The blog is AtomEnabled, the layout and font size are improved, the explanatory text that's hidden until you hover over the links is now visible, you can load the links into your browser's sidebar on Internet Explorer or Firebird for easier clicking, and the archives are slightly less broken and include permalinked dates. I'll probably also fix up the colors and formatting later.
In short, reading the Daily Links on that page should be more pleasant than merely reading them on the sidebar of my main blog, and the best experience is still probably to read them in your aggregator of choice.
Update: I've moved the search over to MT-Search, Movable Type's built-in search function, so it's now about a million times more useful. I'll probably be playing with this a bit more.
Definitely better in several ways. Nice. Would you be willing to make your MT template for the atom feed available?
One quibble: base target="_main" seems to make Mozilla open links in a new window. Is there a way to make the sidebar version open links in the main browser window without having the regular version spawn new ones?
Heh. My Atom template is basically the default Atom template for MT. (Requires that you be on the current version of MT.) The target="_main" thing does suck in Moz, I'm trying to figure that out, because it just works so nicely in IE and Firebird that I hate to give it up.
Maybe I'll put in some browser sniffing when I update that page again in 5 years.
I just installed that Default Atom Template today on my blog, and boy is it ever nice. While I always upgrade to the latest version the day it comes out, somehow I missed the announcement that Atom support was added.
I love it, though. Those Atom feeds are slick. I'm glad to see that there are others adding them, too.
wtf, i hate the new format, its not easy to read, and theres too much info. i liked the other way better where if i wasnt interested in a headline, i wouldnt even hover over it to see the text, now im forced to see that bullshit text for shit im not interested in such as "blogging" news and blog shit..
I had just put sideblogging in and at the time it seemed pretty okay, but then it started cluttering up the joint which had just been redesigned. I think i'll incorporate the sidebar. I also had it AtomEnabled, but without being able to see it in action, didn't really have see a good reason to incorporate it. I do believe I'll be adding it in.
Graham:
There is a Tabbrowser extension for Firebird that I believe should work for Moz, as well. Can't swear by it, but I believe I was using it on Moz before I switched to Firebird about 6 months back. (I believe there are actually two extensions, one called "Tabbrowser Preferences" and one called "Tabbrowser Extensions.")
But, anyway - my actual comment is there's a setting that will open any link that is not off the base URL in a new tab. I find it fantastic for thinks like sideblogs that have several links off one list.
Thanks, Charles. I'll look into it.
On another note: this is the first place I've seen the new comment-redirect in action (can you tell I haven't updated my Movable Type install in a while?). One mildly annoying thing is that mousing over, say, Charles' name only shows the URL of the redirect script, so you have to click without knowing where you're going. It might be nice to add a title attribute or something to show a tooltip.
(Sorry if this is out of place, Anil.)
Anil - Unfortunately, the Atom feed doesn't validate... I haven't done any development with XML/Atom recently, so I didn't attempt to debug it. That's mildly annoying, because I really enjoy reading your blog in FeedDemon, which doesn't even throw nice error messages if it's not well-formed Atom.
Just FYI, Validation
Karl, thanks for the tip, I had a typo which broke validation and is fixed now. Graham, I agree that losing the URL in mouseover is annoying, I'll be putting in some fixes in the template so the URL is still visible when you point at the link but the redirect is in place for Google.
And Asshat, thank you for your constructive criticism. Since the links no longer fit your needs now that I'm display additional information on each one, I'd be glad to refund the money you've paid for the content I'm providing you.
Oh, wait, you aren't paying me anything!
Anil, the links page still lists "index.xml" as an alternate version in the <link> tag, but it doesn't seem to exist any more. I see that "index.rdf" does, though.
Any chance we could get permalinks for the Daily Links? I coulda swore the way you had them earlier, there were anchors in the HTML for each link (although one had to look at the source to find this out).
Yep, working on Daily Links permalinks next. The archives already have them.
My eyes must have flown right past that part when I first read the entry, because lo, there was the answer to my question.
Any plans on including links within the description (i.e. the comments below the links)? That would require stripping the HTML out for the title attribute for inclusion on the sidebar as they are now. I initially did that for my sidelinks (complete with a different-looking permalink icon for if there was a description than if there wasn't), but stopped because I thought that the links in the description were just as important as the initial links themselves. Not that I see any point in your doing do, since the way you do it works just as well. Just curious is all.
The point is getting to be moot anyway, at least for me, since I get at least 3 times the amount of readers through an aggregator than through a browser.
certainly better nav
Looks good to me.. is there an aggregator you recommend?
BTW I'd love to hear your thoughts on anonymous blogging, as discussed at Gothamist: http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2004/02/02/outting_of_scott_lapatine.php
On Windows, I recommend FeedDemon as the best standalone aggregator, and NewsGator as the best aggregator integrated with Outlook and a web app. On the Mac, NetNewsWire. Of the purely web-based ones, they all still feel a little wonky to me, though I'm sure they're improving and Kinja will probably be good when it launches.
I'll have to think about the anonymous blogging thing, I'm conflicted on that...
Why does www.anildash.com not work any more?
possible that http://www.dashes.com/links/atom.xml does not work in feed demon?
Feed Demon was a great suggestion! BUT: It's not free. Could you suggest any freeware for this purpose?
I'm curious as to how you have your links blog setup cos I'm trying to do it with my sideblog. Do u put the uri into the entry body and the description in extended ? If so how do u extract the uri for the feed ? I'm stuck on this, I found some Regex code from Richard on the MT Forums but regex isn't working on MT3 for me anyways. Any ideas ?
I'm curious as to how you have your links blog setup cos I'm trying to do it with my sideblog. Do u put the uri into the entry body and the description in extended ? If so how do u extract the uri for the feed ? I'm stuck on this, I found some Regex code from Richard on the MT Forums but regex isn't working on MT3 for me anyways. Any ideas ?