A newley.com programing note: As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been experimenting with some new functionality that allows me to automatically post my daily Twitter activity on this site. The result is the “Recently on Twitter.com/newley” posts you’ve likely been seeing.
The reason I’ve been testing out this kind of daily digest is that I want to be able to share here, on newley.com, the links and various updates I post on Twitter. Non-Twitter users are probably sick of hearing about the service; I can sympathize — I’m a huge fan of Twitter myself, and even I get a sense that the service’s importance is overblown. ((As it happens, however, I’ve been using Twitter for just over a year, and I have more than 700 followers, which is nearly double the number of RSS readers for newley.com — and I’ve been blogging here for seven years. Naturally, it should be said that this comparison doesn’t account for those who visit newley.com directly, or for those who arrive here via search engines.))
I realize, though, that these compiled tweets, when viewed on this site, lack some context. In addition, I don’t want newley.com readers to be bombarded with my tweets — if you want to follow me on Twitter, you know how to do that. So for now, I’m doing away with these daily digests. (Note that you can still see my recent tweets on the right side of the page, under Twitter Updates.)
I’m also searching for a way that I can automatically post, here on this site, bookmarks from delicious.com or elsewhere. The problem is that, based on my experience, anytime you try to create automatic blog posts, they tend to lack polish. Publishing platforms like Tumblr (which I’ve blogged about before) and the newly popular Posterous ((For more on Posterous and blogging, check out Steve Rubel’s thoughts here.)) — services that allow you to aggregate content from elsewhere or at least make creating blog posts extremely easy — often make for blog posts that seem…well, to lack polish. Which is logical, because such posts are created automatically and/or very quickly.
All of this by way of saying: Bear with me. If you see some strange posts here, or if some weird-looking items find their way into the RSS feed, hang in there. And thanks, as ever, for reading. If you have any thoughts on any of this, please leave a comment or email me: newley [@] gmail.com
One reply on “A programing note — and thoughts on web publishing, Twitter, Tumblr, and Posterous”
Hey Newley,
On the subject, if you are a Digg user (Digger) they have some nice customisable widget for blogs which can be found on the website. Might be worth a look/experiment.