What most of you don’t know (I can tell this by looking at my FeedBurner stats) is that next to the main RSS Feed (dubbed “Bram.us – Days in the Life of a Geezer named Bramus!”) a second feed (dubbed “Bram.us – Elsewhere than the Life of a Geezer named Bramus!”) is offered here at bram.us. The feed is generated from content I enter through a nifty WordPress Plugin named fQuick, created by Fredrik Fahlstad, allowing you to hold and maintain a Linklog.
In exactly one year time (fQuick has been installed for exactly 1 year now) I have entered just under 1000 entries, as you can see in The Elsewhere Archive. During this year I have found myself tweaking the code from the original plugin to make managing it more comfortable than ever as fQuick has been stuck at version 1.2 over more than one and a half years (Last update was on nov 7, 2005):
- One of the first things I had changed was the output in the sidebar to fit my style (some HTML fiddling).
- Later on the archives page followed to provide neat list, grouped by date (some PHP and MySQL fiddling).
- Other aesthetic tweak was done at the admin manage page: only the last 50 entries are shown and the URIs are cut at 50 chars preventing the page from generating horizontal scrollbars (some PHP, MySQL and HTML fiddling)
- Last but not least I fixed the RSS feed. The original script didn’t use CDATA tags to wrap around the description of each item, making the use of HTML into the description field of the fQuick useless as it would break the feed’s validity
- (Not really a tweak, but I’ve not hardcoded a redirect to the FeedBurner-version of the feed … should make that configurable from within the admin options page)
Now, I was wondering if I should release these little tweaks as Fredrik has written instructions on to creating SideNotes with comments support a little while ago …
Waiting for your input on this … and don’t forget to take a little peek at the Elsewhere Archive, or even subscribe to the Elsewhere Feed 😉
B!
You should make them public, yes. Not because I want to use it (or maybe I will, hmm), but because it is nice to do so.
I’m sure many people will love you for doing so, so you benefit as well. 🙂
I think I’ll subscribe to that feed too, by the way.
Martijn, I do know that it would be real nice to release the update (still need to do some tweaks and provide some more configurable options), but I’m really wondering if it’s worth it as I myself am thinking of using Fredriks “Sidenotes with Commenting” where one creates an extra category holding those links and provides the user the option to enable commenting on posted items (which will never be possible with the current fQuick).
In summary the real question in fact is not “should I release it because it’s the right thing to do?” (which of course is ‘yes’), but “should I go through the hassle of implementing some more stuff if there’s a better method out there?” 😉
There’ll always be people who prefer installing & activating a plugin over (serious) fiddling with the code. So, yes: release it.
Adding more stuff to it? That’s up to you. I have to say that, in my case, I lost interest in expanding the functionality of my plugins once they were working for me (and most people). I’ve got other stuff I’d much rather do.
And keep those sweet links coming! It’s always one of the first feeds I read (and because of the quantity, probably the feed I read the most ;)).
What Kevin said:
There’ll always be people who prefer installing & activating a plugin over (serious) fiddling with the code. So, yes: release it.
And eventhough i enjoyed your links from time to time, i am absolutly shocked that there are so many (and that i missed so many)! You should advertise your links a bit more on your site! Or add them to the main feed (inman does this as well – if that helps :p ), afterall it is part of your content. Why divide it into two sources? Could be seen as easier to manage, could be seen as additional hassle.
For me its hassle, i want your links in the main feed 🙂
Manu, one combined feed indeed is the good thing to do (see kottke and inman), but that would require some massiv’ (aaight!) custom querying and scripting as both systems work independently from (to?) each other … maybe I’ll give it a try when I find some free time in the piled-up week schedule 😉
Yet again … “Is the juice worth the squeeze”? Reason I ask is because when one uses those instructions from Fredrik to creating a wp-category for your fQuick/Elswhere/SideNotes/whatever you call it the main RSS feed would automatically contain the posts from that category…
thought about the inman as well — aiiiiight, then do the following: create a plugin which creates a shorties category, which, with example tag get the_shorties() can we put whereever one desires and which is sported in the main feedster.
which basicly is what asides are, …or?
Manu, odd term you have thrown in imo … asides … who the f*ck came up with that?! 😛
Found a nice wp-plugin named minipostswhilst googling that one which does the requests above … tested with 1 new item in my main feed which should be visible immediately … time to back-import those ‘old’ Elsewhere/fQuick entries if all goes well … 😉