As part of my discovery process for posting to Lifestream Blog, I monitor a large number of outlets looking for interesting items in the world of Lifestreaming. Most of the items I find don’t ever make it onto the blog. A subset of what I find is interesting enough that I usually share it via Twitter, FriendFeed, and Delicious. If you follow me on those services then you may see those items but my suspicion is that often you don’t. It is this content that I’ve currently been exploring ways on how to highlight more effectively on the blog.
On the right sidebar I have my Delicious Feed of Lifestreaming tagged content displayed under “Latest Info”. So if you were to visit the site daily (who does that?) or subscribed to the RSS feed, you may still get that information. But I wanted to provide more than just a text feed for this. I considered using Posterous, Tumblr, and FriendFeed to do this primarily because of the powerful bookmarklet features available for each of these. The goal was to use these services and then embed the feed into my sidebar. I thought by providing the richer forms of content with images and videos it would make for a more compelling experience. But after giving more thought to this, there were several compelling reasons to not go down this path. I wasn’t happy with some of the limitations of being able to embed and customize the content and once again it would require people to follow a secondary RSS feed to get everything. Also by having an external source of information you couldn’t use the site search to find all of the content. Lastly I also think it’s easier to keep as many resources as I find here on my blog where I can also interact with all the conversations that revolve around the content as well.
So with this decision I have been researching several WordPress tools to help facilitate ways to make posting this information easier and offer some of the features available in the tools I had considered. One incredibly useful tool is the Press This feature already available in WordPress which I hadn’t considered previously using. It basically offers most of the functionality available from other services in a bookmarklet that allows you to easily create posts to WordPress.
Here is a video that demonstrates the feature:
You can find the feature by clicking on “Tools” in your WordPress admin section. You can find more info here as well.
I’ve also been looking for any other tools to help with this and came across the WordPress QuickPost plugin. I haven’t played with it yet but plan on seeing if it offers any additional features.
So for now I have averaged a pretty low output of posts from the blog averaging only 2-3 a week. I plan on increasing that quite a bit by starting to highlight content this way. I think part of my previous concerns in doing this is that it might cause too much content being created with my personal reviews or commentary getting muddled or lost. While my output may increase a bit, hopefully that won’t be the case.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on how you use external tools effectively or have found ways to optimize WordPress to do so. Also, if you have any thoughts on my increasing posts to Lifestream Blog using this method.
Thanks,
Mark
