As I work on the design of the blog, it's been really interesting to get feedback from people who are serious readers of this blog. I feel like it's the first time in the many years this blog has been running that it is enough under control that we can start to have a serious discussion about how it works. Gives you an idea of what kind of haze we operate in in Internet land. One of the reasons I decided a number of years ago to S L O W D O W N and start re-doing everything in my toolkit, one piece at a time, and this time really understand how the bits work together.  

I still don't really understand, but it is now possible to talk about it, some more.  

Anyway... 

I just did some work on the linkblog in the right margin here. 

1. I made the first word in the box "linkblog" so there's no doubt what you're looking at. One bit of feedback I got was that people didn't know it was the linkblog. Totally makes sense. Unless they were reading on the day the feature came online, how would they know. And I'm not entirely sure I even wrote it up. All of a sudden one day there are links in the right margin. Who gives them much though.  

2. I removed the Last updated time in the upper right margin, the one that applied to the content in the left column. It was completely non-obvious, in fact it sort of implied that it applied to the linkblog. Oy. Anyway, now the time does apply to the linkblog. I know this may screw up your reading habits, but it's in a good cause, imho. 

3. I put a gray background behind it so it appears different from everything else on the page. 

4. Added a mini XML icon at the bottom. Now you can easily find the linkblog feed. It won't work in Google Reader, I can tell you that right off the bat. Most of the items have descriptions and no titles. GR doesn't like that. Until they fix this bug, the feed won't work there. And if you think you can do a transformation on the feed perhaps with Yahoo Pipes to make it work in GR, go for it. Publish a link to your version of my linkblog feed, and I'll link to it right here.  

BTW, if you look at the RSS in that feed, you'll see a bunch of new stuff from the "microblog" namespace. It describes the archive for the feed, so you can get back to every item ever published in it. I hope this becomes widely used by other tools. Using RSS as an archive format for all kinds of blogging is a perfect use for the format, which was designed to mirror the content of a chronologic website (i.e. a weblog or blog). 

I also include the full link, because we live in an era of link-shortening. If rot ever becomes a problem with these links, it'll be good to have the full links around too.  

I hope to be able to address some other longterm limits of RSS, for example, we need a way to do feed-level redirects. Always have. I plan to provide a mechanism for that.  

Now the question is what to do about the blogroll. Note that it is also available in the World Outline. This is the next thing to think about folks. All this shit has a life "over there" too. Whatever that means. (Mwhahahaha.)