Fresh Links

Just an addendum to my previous post, in which I lamented the breaking of Google Reader's share function, which enabled the "Fresh Links" widget over on the sidebar—

I have created a near fix, as you'll see if you look over on the side. I'm using the RSS feed from my Delicious account for this, since it was sitting dormant. (Thus some of those links are very much not fresh right now!)


There are some limitations to this system. What made Google Reader's share function so useful for this was that it required one quick at the bottom of whatever post you wanted to read. That was it. It took one second and poof!, a link automatically appeared. The new system is not so fast, because whether I do it from Reader or from NetNewsWire, it requires at least an extra click and, since I use Delicious's tagging system, the categorization of the shared link.

What this means is that the items in the Fresh Links section are things I really want to share — enough to take the time to plug them into Delicious — not just things I found momentarily interesting. That removes some of the improvisatory feeling of the Fresh Links section, but it also means the general quality of the links will be, in my eyes at least, higher.

I've kept the Diigo links widget there on the sidebar, even though it and Delicious have similar purposes. If I were starting from scratch, in fact, I'd use Diigo because it has more options for display and functionality. But I use Diigo for research and for my classes, so the links you'll find there have a different purpose and tend to be much more exclusively related to the things I teach and research. I certainly could create Diigo tags that would separate things differently, but for whatever weird psychological reason, I find it helpful to compartmentalize.

That's all probably more information than anybody needs...

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