Rethinking the External Reading Feature
August 23, 2008
Awhile back I added the “External Readings“ feature to this site that allowed me to place links to things I found interesting elsewhere on the web. I had seen it in quite a few places, the concept wasn’t new to me, and I think it was a good idea.
The problem with my approach was that it started to add up. Every time I would post a link Textpattern had to add an article to the list, making it difficult to manage over time. While viewers of my site wouldn’t notice the difference the management of things took longer than I had expected. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Textpattern’s way of handling data, it was really just poor planning on my end.
Adding an extra article is fine if you’re actually writing an article or posting a photo of the week. But it seems a bit backwards for a set of external links that really don’t need to be in the articles list, especially when there are other ways to handle them.
So I looked at the two options that seemed to jump out at me, delicious.com and Ma.gnolia. In the end I chose Ma.gnolia, probably for no other reason than the aesthetic and ease of use. (Not that I thought delicious was difficult.) And at some point in the near future I will be integrating that into my site, hopefully in a way that won’t slow down the page loading. (more on all of that later.)
So, if you had subscribed to my external reading feed you may want to adjust your feed readers to point to the new feed at Ma.gnolia. Actually, I’ll probably make it easy for you and do an automatic redirect over to that feed as well.
That’s all I have for now, I just wanted to explain why the list of external links left the page in case they were being missed. With any luck they should return shortly, hopefully with a few enhancements.
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