Link Post Revival - Link of the Day announcement

July 28, 2013

Link Post Revival - Link of the Day announcement → via @_patrickwelker

This is one of the rare meta-posts you see from time to time on my website. It’s a follow-up to my About Link Posts and more article which doubles as an announcement:

RocketINK now officially sports two kind of link posts.

I always had two kind of link posts on the site, but it’s only lately that I have fully accepted that the classic “DF-Style” link posts should be a part of this site. It’s like the site now has a “link of the day” section.

Rest assured that there will not be a flood of new meaningless posts. My guess is that most times I will post one link in the evening that struck me as the most interesting one.

Here’s want my upcoming link posts say about themselves:

I won’t be spam, I will be relevant or interesting.

A fresh link post about a cool Kickstarter campaign that wouldn’t have made it into the Link List in time.

I aint’ no technology related topic. Fo shizzle.

Link post with an attitude that promises it will not be about cats, dogs, trolls or rainbows. That’s what parts of the Link List are reserved for.

I can help Patrick finish that big article he’s writing without worrying about having nothing added to RocketINK for a whole week.

The care bear of all the link posts. He’s indeed super nice and caring. Usually he’s the one that I’d love to show you immediately after discovering it, but until now dismissed it or kept in in a queue for the Link List.

I’m so awesome. When will you introduce me to your friends.

Link Post that is a cousin of the care bear link post. It’s indeed awesome/excellent/brilliant/superb, so it’s only understandable that it isn’t shy about it. I will no longer hold it back from meeting as many people as possible. Subject could be that new revolutionary app on the block.

I’m a comment to an article.

Link Post that pays hommage to an article by someone else aka a full-featured reading suggestion.

Changes are good, options are better

Have no fear. You know I like to have options if you’ve read any of my Keyboard Maestro posts. It’s only logical and fair to provide you a way to opt out of receiving link posts in your feed reader.

What always made me uncomfortable was that not everybody likes the experience that link posts deliver. If your pet lies in the corner after an opulent meal which simply was a touch too much, you let it sleep it off or go for a walk with your quadruped. Still, the best practice is not to overfeed your pal in the first place.

Likewise, caring owners of a RSS client often times have the same problem. When a blogs posts more than 5 link posts a day they start to get nervous (me too) and can see how bloated their beloved RSS reader suddenly looks. They know that more links will join the already existing ones and that the evening walk with their digital pet will probably take a bit longer.

Owing to the fact that I care for animals and RSS users alike, my solution is to not overdue it and in addition I’ll offer a RSS feed without link posts. Personally I appreciate it when sites offer multiple RSS feeds where it makes sense. This to me is a scenario where it makes sense.

You can subscribe to the new feed without link posts here: https://rocketink.net/feed-nolinks.xml.

If you think you can manage the small additional overhead and are curious what links I will post you don’t have to do anything. On the other hand, if link posts aren’t your cup of tea I’d appreciate it even more if you give this new addition to my site a chance before switching to the trimmed RSS feed.

Note: Linked Lists will stay as they are. I want this tech-centric blog to have a mixed full of surprises from time to time – even if some links are 100% off topic.

Brains or Looks

We say we don’t care about the looks and that only the inner values are what really counts. Sometimes this is true, other times it’s just preposterous. I want RocketINK to have the brains and the looks – so I hope you appreciate a bit of curves on a feed. More precisely: curves that will tell a story of how this blog is growing up and who takes it by hand with every step it makes.1

Fighting the bloated belly syndrome mentioned above was the first step. So, to keep my blog “sexy”, attractive and good looking I want my link posts to look different from the usual posts here on rocketink.net. Starting with a smaller teaser image and some other changes I haven’t coded yet.

The archive will also get a small design update. The first steps are taken; I moved the existing link posts to the bottom. As they are not the star of this blog, they don’t deserve the pole position.

Realizing that I don’t have to abandon the idea completely, took me quite a while. The way I see it now is, link posts are like nutrition and vital organs in one. They exist but act more in the background, keeping the blog going on a more natural pace without huge gaps while still maintaining a set of interested topics. I want them to look more subtle, but also be relevant or interesting content-wise.[^time]

It’s a running experiment. Don’t expect to see the design changes happening overnight. There’s also the chance that I change my mind about the structure of the archive again (or even how I treat link posts on the whole).

To sum it up: I think this might work for keep me writing more frequently here with the bonus of not feeling stucked in between my drafts for longer articles.

  1. Trust me, you’re not the only one who is shaking his head in disbelief when reading these lines because the analogies are so bad and cheesy. In my mind I’m ending the sentence above with “curves that will tell a story of how this young girl grows into a woman.” That just doesn’t seem to work in this context, but then again if you know that I recently purchased a shower gel which carried the label “The daily care for young women” it starts to makes sense… with the “care”, and the “daily” and the “young”. Let me transcribe the hidden message: this young blog delivers you a carefully selected link on a daily basis. Yeah. It’s there’s still no reason to use the words I used other than sharing my embarrassing shopping habits with you. On the plus side, this will stop the comparisons saying the sum of my feed frequency looks like a Karl Lagerfeld model when looking at all the posts of a month lined up. – Since I doubt this footnote makes the paragraph any better. I will stop right here.

comments powered by Disqus

Related Posts