Content, like water, flows downhill

Here’s to post titles.  So obvious!  I’ve gone all tumblr-ish (still proudly wordpress powered) and switched up my site format. In the last two iterations of eleven3 I compartmentalized different types of content. Flickr photos went in one section, delicious links in another, articles in another, etc…

Officially, today, I am done with all of that. For so long, new content added to my blog meant me actually thinking about something compelling, writing it, then having the stones to hit publish. I published roughly three articles in 2009 – that’s terrible, my system is broken.

If I am going to keep up a steady stream of content, it has to be more sharing than writing and things have to get easier for me to update. Blogs that rely solely on the written article can dry up in a hurry if the author is more of a sharer. If I was able to share some of the interesting content I took in and make it more presentable, I would be on to something. Then I realized that’s what tumblr trend was all about! Doh! I’m a slow learner.

My system is broken

First step, make the action of sharing flow from my actions of consuming. I consume media in two places – NetNewsWire (NNW) and Safari. I’ve been a big fan of the delicious integration in NNW since day one – I simply use a bookmarklet in Safari for posting to delicious. My usage of delicious sort of dropped off when I realized I never went back and found anything I bookmarked – or at the least, very rarely. This too will change with my new sharing flow.

There are two types of content I will share frequently – links & videos. I will use delicious to bookmark these items and use the taxonomy I created to only pull the content I want to share, not everything I bookmark at delicious.

Links in themselves are kind of boring, I’ve decided to give my two cents (like many others are doing) about the site being linked to. I have a feeling this will finally make me more important than I really am. It’s easy to accomplish link sharing by using a combination of delicious and the feedwordpress plugin. I simply created a tagging schema (link, publish), added a description, and imported the feed into wordpress. Simple.

Upon figuring out how to pull in links with descriptions, I started toying with the idea of having anything I am sharing imported into the blog this way. Using delicious, feedwordpress, and Viper’s Video Quicktags (awesome name), I now have it set that any vimeo or youtube video I bookmark pulls into the blog stream and looks a certain way.

All other content will be posted on the eleven3 site through the traditional means – log into wordpress and post.

I’m excited to start sharing again.

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