Site Update : Asides and Footnotes
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It is time for another site update - we have a couple of new features now. I have always wanted to have some facility to point you, my readers, to interesting stuff that I come across every day. There are many ways to share links, and I evaluated each of them.
Google Reader’s Shared Items can be used for this purpose, and Robert Scoble’s link blog is actually his shared items page. However, this restricts me to sharing only links that I come across in my feeds. Also, I tend to alternate between Google Reader and an offline feed reader, when my internet connection becomes slower.
Tumblelog can be used for this purpose, but giving away control of it to someone else (folks at Tumblelog) is not very enticing.
I had initially set up a blog on my personal domain for sharing links, but it does not have much following (none at the moment 
). Besides, devoting an entire blog and feed to this purpose seems overkill.
I decided that whatever way I set up the linkblog, it would be on this domain. With this, I used ProBlogDesign’s method of setting up a sideblog. There are two parts to his madness method - setting up a filter in functions.php, and a loop in sidebar.php. However, the sideblog messes up the title tag I use on this blog, so I removed the sideblog but kept the filter.
So, I have link posts that I write, but they will not appear anywhere on the blog except the feed. Talk about exclusivity! Maybe I’ll entice new readers to subscribe to my feeds for this ‘bonus’ content too 
The second feature is footnotes. Made possible by WPFootnotes plugin, footnotes are actually side commentary which may not be liked by everyone. So I gave them a secluded corner at the end of every post (only in single post view on the site itself). For every footnote I want to enclose, there would be a little superscript number (1, 2 etc.), which links to the corresponding footnote at the end of the post ((you have to see it in action to understand it)). (If you’re on feed reader, why don’t you click through to see it? )
Do tell me whether you’d like a separate feed for the links posts (it is easy using Pipes). Also, take out the footnotes for a spin.
Binny V A said on February 11th, 2008
You not just use del.icio.us? Then anyone could subscribe to that feed.
Post authorSumesh said on February 11th, 2008
@Binny: Del.icio.us is a possibility, but then I’d have to make a new feed, and you’d have to subscribe to another one. Also, I won’t be able to add anything more than a few lines of note.