.HOME
[Linkstream]
October 5th, 2009In the average day, I spend quite a bit of time looking at various websites and seeing a great deal of content. It’s for this reason that I consider myself an Information Junkie. I follow over 50 people on twitter and I’m constantly looking for more things to read. In my daily routine, I see a lot of content from a lot of different sources on topics all over the place. I’ve needed something to do with the lists of the interesting pages I run across.
I used to have a person or two that I’d talk to on AIM with, where we’d do something I can only describe as Link Tennis. I link them to something I’m looking at that’s interesting, they do the same, ad aitourdaium. People, however, have a habit of being too inconsiderate to be online when I feel like I need to share a link with someone. Then came IRC. I idle/chat in a handful of IRC Channels mostly constantly. The fix to my problem was to just paste my link in the various channels that someone might be interested. However, I don’t keep logs of IRC activity, so if I want to get at a link that I distributed later I wouldn’t be able to find it and it’d be lost on me forever.
Enter, the Linkstream.
So, I’ve battled with the various ways that I could share and update links as I came across them. My first plan was to just update a page on my webserver and display it dynamically. For this, I wrote a shitty Ruby script that would do this all magically for me. The problem here, though, was that I would have to have Ruby installed and the script around on any internet-capable device that I wanted to update links from. So, that option was out. My next plan was to write a web-app that would allow me to insert messages, it would display them in reverse-order, and syndicate it on my website. I opened up my trusty-coding notepad when it occurred to me that someone already does this. Twitter.
Twitter? I use twitter, but I didn’t want to pollute my feed with my links, and I didn’t want to pollute my linkstream with the random infrequent messages I put on Twitter. To solve this, I created another twitter account for this purpose. There were problems with twitter, namely that they use bit.ly for their links, regardless of whether it breaks the 140 character limit or not. They have some criteria for their link-shortener, but I didn’t know it and I didn’t want to destroy the internet with the wide-spread use of URL shortening services. So, I needed to find an alternative.
There is a surprising few alternatives to twitter that exist. I suppose it’s silly to attempt to make a ‘new twitter’ when they clearly have a foothold on the industry of being twitter. I had only three criteria:
- It is currently in operation.
- It has an RSS Feed
- It doesn’t shorten my god-damn URLs.
I was very happy to find Jaiku, which fits all three of these criteria. So, for your link-browsing pleasure. It’s probably going to slow down the website some, ’cause it will aggregate the RSS feeds before the rest of the content of the page, but that doesn’t particularly concern me. If it concerns you, go somewhere else.
 |
October 20th, 2009 at 1:35
I want to be able to comment on your links in the stream.
October 20th, 2009 at 8:37
Yeah, I wouldn’t mind that functionality, either, but it’s something that probably won’t happen. For it to, it would pretty much have to make a Blag post every time a new one is up, and that would have too much congestion.
Linkstream v2 might have comments functionality, we’ll see.