This is the successor to my post on how to build a weekly digest in 3 seconds.
One question I’m frequently asked is “how do you build those Best of Feeds weekly links?” The way I do it is pretty complicated, but I’ve found a much simpler solution that I want to share with you all. Building a list of links is something every blogger does at one time or another, and it doesn’t have to be hard.
Why Create a Link Post?
Link posts are great ways to share and acknowledge interesting links. Linking to other blogs is what makes the blogosphere tick. If you don’t routinely read and link to other bloggers then your using your blog as a one-way soapbox instead of as a medium for sparking communication and building relationships.
Link posts can be used for a variety of reasons:
- Weekly Round-up
- List of resources about a subject
- List of group writing participants
- List of contest participants
Here are some more tips from the experts on why create a link post
- Make your link post matter
- The SEO reasons to link out
- Finding value with daily link posts
- the ProBlogger ultimate guide to link love
- (thanks to Jan for helping me find these)
Step #1: Use Delicious to Save Links
I’m a delicious power user and it’s my favourite site for bookmarking interesting links. It integrates nicely with whatever web browser you are using.
This video explains how to use Delicious to bookmark sites
Delicious already comes with a way of posting a daily link report, but I don’t like it because I feel like I’m spamming my regular readers if my blog is filled with “links for 2007-10-02″ instead of stuff I wrote myself. I much prefer posting once a week, or having full control over when I post my list of links.
But the delicious tagging system is so useful for building a list of links around a specific subject, and for attaching short descriptions around each link. For instance, I used the ‘project3′ tag when I was picking out my favorite posts from the Project 3 group writing project on Daily Blog Tips.
Delicious also integrates nicely into your web browser, no matter what it might be.
- *new* firefox bookmarks extension
- firefox extension *this is the one I use*
- internet explorer buttons
- bookmarklet buttons for any browser
Step #2: Use Delicious Link Builder
I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe that builds a list of your del.icio.us links that you can cut-and-paste into a blog post.
- Put in your delicious username
- Optional: Filter your links by a tag
- Optional: Filter your links by date
- Optional: Limit the number of links (maximum is 31, this is a limit from del.icio.us)
- Click ‘Run Pipe‘
- Cut-and-paste the results into a blog post using your WYSIWYG editor
The Results
This is an example of a list from my delicious saved bookmarks.
- [CODE] Software Is Hard
- *Excellent* article about software estimation and Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code
- [ESTIMATION] Web Worker 101: Estimating Basics
- Nothing new, but good round-up for people who have trouble estimating.
- [LIFEHACKS] The Printable CEO
- Collection of PDFs for task/hour tracking.
- [RAILS] Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications
- Free e-book for next 60 days. Probably not as good as Agile Web Development.
- [WORKHACKS] Cover Your Butt At Work with Thorough Notes
- If you have to CYA that much then you might want to say cya to that job. But there is a lot of be said for indoctrinating the people around you that you are coordinated and correct because everything is tracked.
That’s all there is to it. Bookmark web pages with delicious, then go into Delicious Link Builder when you want to make a list of them.
You can start by bookmarking this post. :)
Advanced Users - Pretty Cut-n-Paste
I use a Greasemonkey script in Firefox to make the output of Yahoo Pipes a little bit nicer.
Advanced Users - Clone Your Own Pipe
If you’re logged into Yahoo then you’ll have the option to ‘clone’ my Pipe (Delicious Links Builder). This means you have your own copy of it and you can change the default values for the fields to whatever you want, eg: always default to your username, and to 7 days worth of links.
Advanced Users - StumbleUpon
If you’re using delicious to save bookmarks, you can also use another handy Greasemonkey script I created that lets you save web pages to StumbleUpon at the same time you’re saving them to Delicious.
Related Links
- Blog Tip: Create a digest post in 3 seconds
- Blog Tip: Create a Blog Maintenance Start Page with Netvibes
- Yahoo Pipe Cleaner
There’s Plenty More
See the full list of free software I have created.
You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.
This post was written as part of the Geeks Are Sexy Ultimate “How-To” contest.
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10 Comments
I keep meaning to do this. One of these days…
Of course if this was all automated in a WordPress plugin admin panel with a preview… (hint);)
Are creating these kinds of link posts mutually valuable? What benefits do they gain the linker and the linkee? Without wishing to cause offense, I sometimes simply skip over this kind of post because it often looks like nothing more than linkbaiting or even dashboard spam, although admittedly some blogs (like this one) do provide useful outbounds that I will check out, but this is not the case across the blogosphere.
db
great tip engtech. (your secrets are now exposed). love the way you reuse what you did in your blog into another good post.
@sciencebase:
The linkee doesn’t get the same thing out of it as a regular blog post because it isn’t really part of the conversation (although you have 120-140 characters to describe a link in delicious).
But I find that link lists can be a GREAT resource for finding interesting stuff. Surprisingly stuff I’ve linked to in my Best of Feeds has gotten mentioned on lifehacker.com 3 times now.
The way I see it is there are two extremes: write a blog post about every individual link that is just a summary or do a ‘interesting link round-up’ style every week or so. I know I’m more likely to regularly read a blog that does the later vs a blog that does the former. If all a blog does is secondary source information with no original posts then why read it when you can read the original sources?
(of course, some people are REALLY GOOD at being a secondary source for interesting things… boingboing, etc… and every niche has room for a few good blogs that secondary source stuff… and some add great commentary)
I have a whole wackload of tumbleblogs I ‘loosely’ follow by people like zenhabits.net and skelliewag.org that have been great sources of information even though they have 0 original content.
@Ian Stewart:
I have no doubt there is a wordpress plugin for doing link lists, but for me that would lose some of its effectiveness.
What I really like is that I’m using delicious to save links, and then the delicious tags to group them. That opens up 101 different tools and hacks for working with delicious that a custom plugin wouldn’t have.
I’m trying, but I’m not getting this. Why use the interstitial step of putting it on delicious instead of just opening a blog page and sticking them straight in the post? I have to do a link post with 15-20 links every day for http://ayyyy.com and anything that would save me time I would do, trust me. I have some fun with the titles of the links (eg a link about Ben Affleck blaming Jennifer Lopez for the end of his career I called “Ben- blames -Nifer for failure”) and you can always give it some cute or explanatory rollover text. I think of these posts as sketches, and keep the Write Post page open so I can sketch in a link at any time in my browsing. What’s the advantage to me of installing a FF extension and learning how to use it, registering with delicious and learning how to use that and then opening both delicious and the post window every time I want to make a post?
Although I do not rule out that there may be something fundamental to delicious that I’m just not getting. If it’s something you’re using already, I can see that using a tool you already use is fine. But is it worth starting from scratch with this if you don’t go anywhere near delicious?
@ sciencebase: quite frankly, a lot of blogs have deals with other blogs that guarantee them a place in the daily link lists. It’s banned at WordPress.com of course, but common in many circles. And of course, promiscuous linking to certain other bloggers to draw their attention is nothing new. Works, too. Also, it’s a good way to boost blogs that don’t have great readership but who will appreciate hits you send their way. Those people become loyal supporters.
But mostly, it’s just “hey, I saw this and it was neat” when you don’t feel like typing out a whole post about it.
@raincoaster:
Using delicious vs having an editor open and creating the post do work out to being the same thing. Where I found value with it was when it isn’t a daily link post. It’s a lot easier to use delicious to save posts over *time* (building different lists using tagging).
The other advantage to delicious is that when you’re trying to find something you looked at before. If you thought it was worth saving then you probably have a link to it. I have 1820 links saved in delicious that I can access from any computer at any time. Someone’s even built a yahoo search that will limit itself to sites you’ve bookmarked in delicious.
Here’s an example of how delicious could be useful to you:
as you bookmark sites you tag them with ay, rc, topost, etc. This’ll let you create two link buckets, one at del.icio.us/raincoaster/ay another at del.icio.us/raincoaster/rc . You could be building a list of stuff you want to create full blog posts about at del.icio.us/raincoaster/topost
But the real value is a year down the line when you are writing a post about harrypotter. You can look at del.icio.us/raincoaster/harrypotter and find everything you’ve ever saved about it.
Yep, hands up! Cross-linking between blogs is important, vital even, and it’s a quick and easy way to create semi-original content, without having to go through the painful process of coming up with an entirely new idea for a post ;-)
db
Link post is a great solution for spreading any information.
There are a lot of ways to create it. You can choose the most convenient to you.
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