Blogging with Ma.gnolia
Tbrown.org used to make a distinction between things “Noted” and things “Marked,” the idea being that Bookmarks were tried and true resources fit for frequent reference and Notes were fleeting, ephemeral nods in directions worth looking.
Pre-realignment, four-column design.
Now, no distinction is necessary. Ma.gnolia has closed this mental divide for me and changed the act of bookmarking for many people. An opinionated bookmark is as easy to write as a blog post because Ma.gnolia allows for an associated description and a rating.
Couple those things (a URL, a description and a rating) with favelet-style ease of creation and all of the benefits inherent in the system, and tell me blogging with Ma.gnolia doesn’t rock.
Granted the nature of the system is such that a single URL, no more, no less, may be the focus of each “post,” but in fact, most of my Noted and Marked posts were short, one-link opinion/fact statements.
Besides, tbrown.org still uses WordPress for multi-paragraph thoughts like this one; however, WP posts blend together with Ma.gnolia bookmarks to form the Notes & Bookmarks column. Theoretically, WordPress could be any publishing software that outputs an RSS feed.
How it works
Notes & Bookmarks are a Feedblendr mashup of RSS feeds from my Ma.gnolia bookmarks and tbrown.org’s WordPress blog. MagpieRSS then turns that mashup into HTML text.
- Ma.gnolia and WordPress provide RSS versions of the things I bookmark and write.
- Feedblendr combines those RSS feeds, sorts individual items by date and time, and provides a single RSS feed for the combined, sorted items.
- MagpieRSS is PHP behind the scenes of tbrown.org that turns the blended RSS feed into HTML markup.
The verdict
I wish my setup were more reliable, but I can’t not blog with Ma.gnolia. It’s just too easy.
Bookmarking things in Ma.gnolia is nearly effortless and is a huge efficiency for me because it helps me remember, sort and share things both inside and outside of the Ma.gnolia website. Treating bookmarking like blogging works for my style of information sharing.
But along the way, as they’re tossed from service to service, feeds are often dropped. It could be an issue at any point in the process outlined above. For a few busy months I’ve been hoping it would be a Feedblendr issue, that way I wouldn’t have to spend time tweaking MagpieRSS (which I seem to break just by opening files).
In addition, special characters show up as question marks. Remembering to change em and en dashes to hyphens, straighten quotes and eliminate other entities altogether is a constant chore.
Bookmarked “posts” don’t live here, they live inside Ma.gnolia. Search engines don’t have anything to index except a home page that points elsewhere. Archiving posts doesn’t really happen, either.
Despite these issues I’m sticking with it.
Over time, as pieces are swapped or upgraded, the path between what I write and what you read will become smoother and simpler.
The tbrown.org Frankenstein, the outsourced future of memory, voice, communication and identity, will rise.
You are here
This writing is part of tbrown.org by Tim Brown.
Read about Tim and tbrown.org on the home page.
Sharing & Discussion
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Recent comments:
At Aug 17, 12:43 PM tim said...
Also swapped out MagpieRSS for Simplepie: http://simplepie.org/
At Aug 17, 12:27 PM tim said...
Had a problem today, so I swapped out Feedblendr for Yahoo Pipes. We'll see if it's more reliable. Already running into some trouble ... Feedburner doesn't accept the RSS url I got from Yahoo Pipes, because of its question mark and ampersand.
Ooh, but now normal typography is acceptable. Apostrophes and quotation marks! I thought it was RSS that was forcing me to change those to primes and double primes, but I guess it was Feedblendr's issue. Yahoo Pipes seems to bring them through without a problem.
At Jun 28, 02:30 PM tim said...
It's a bit convoluted now; the index page, 404, ephemeralink and all /noted/ pages are wordpress. WP fills your directory with tons of files and folders though, and that kinda bothers me. I've thought about outsourcing tbrown.org's notes in the same way the bookmarks are outsourced to Ma.gnolia, but haven't had time to try anything.
Maybe I could use a service like Blogger and blend its RSS in with Ma.gnolia's for tbrown.org's front page ... but then what would individual /noted/ pages look like? And if I had WP hidden away in a directory other than tbrown.org's main one, would I have URL issues? I don't know....
It would be pretty sweet to have just an RSS parser and a few HTML and CSS files in the main directory, running the show. Keep all the content in separate homes elsewhere online.
Hi Tim,
I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about how you plumbed the whole thing together? For example...do you use wordpress to publish the front page...or is the wordpress page hiding somewhere behind the scenes just to generate the RSS? I've been looking at using something like this for a while, and it seems like it works well for you. Just trying to figure out how the get the whole thing connected up right, so any hints would be great. Thanks.
At Jun 11, 08:56 AM tim said...
Hi, thanks for checking out the discussion! Please share your thoughts. If you don't use Ma.gnolia, you should try it. Joining is easy, especially with OpenID.
To comment on this post, please visit its discussion at Ma.gnolia.
Instead of comments, tbrown.org uses a Ma.gnolia group for conversation. It has all kinds of nifty features (I especially like having the ability to edit my comment for 15 minutes before it’s, “official”). You don’t even have to create a username to join, just use your OpenID!
You can also check out other comments about this post.