by Moof

Sun, 21 Dec 2003 15:18:02 +0000

Personally, I'm more a fan of Type B linkblogs, mostly because it fits in with the way my aggregator works (I use rawdog, my aggregator can be found here). Personally, I find a constantly updating article in an RSS feed is just gonna make me ignore the article more.

I have a number of sidebar linkblogs in my feed, and I find it's nice to just see a link turn up in the middle of the page with a little subtitle or description of what it is - you'll see Mark Pilgrim and Simon Willinson do it this way, and it fits in the "headline" feel of most of my aggregator.

There is no official feed for the Daily Python-URL which is a type A linkblog, but the feed that I use does split each into separate articles, and I think that makes much more sense as far as the layout is concerned. Also semantically, it's a bunch of links with a short description, so it deserves separation in the RSS feed, even if doesn't on the original blog. This is as opposed to, say, a Boing Boing link roundup, which is a number of links about the same subject, in which case it semantically belongs together in one article.

As far as your own weblog is concerned, I do quite like the idea of putting the day's links on the day's page. It gives context to the day. However, maybe a weekly view of just the linkblog would be beneficial if we're surfing back through the archive and want to get a decent number of links on one page.

As for categories, well, it depends. I'm thinking of starting a sideblog, once I get my main blog up and running properly again, and I might try to separate RSS feeds of my programming links form the rest of my links, if only becasue I'm aware part of my audience are not programmers, and categories would be an easy shortcut way for me to do that.

I see no reason to have link-specific comments, though it depends on the type of links you're putting up. Boing Boing does have link-specific comments, because most of the links it peppers around don't have comments themselves. Most of the other linkblogs I see tend to turn off comments completely, because the targets of the links have comment areas themselves.

Anyway, that's my 2 eurocent on the subject...

Keith's Weblog: Comments on "Anatomy of a linkblog"

by Moof