Postmarks

December 18, 2005

Back in October when I finally decided that I was going to use SwoofWare and WordPress as my primary location and tool for blogging (versus waffling between other domains (like my personal domain) and other tools (like TextPattern)), I started to have a desire to track and consolidate my comments and posts to various blogs and forums around the internet. I’m not quite sure why exactly I wanted to do it. I’m sure it has narcissistic origins, but I’d like to think that I was looking for some simple way to check back on past conversations to see if there had been follow-up.

At the very least, I wanted to know where I had been. With Google, this isn’t too hard if you have a unique given name or had the forethought to create a unique identity specific to you (hence the future purpose of SwoofWare). But if you have a name like Matt Smith and didn’t do things consistently when leaving comments and posts, it gets kind of hard to know where you’ve been.

At the extreme end, it would be nice to know if someone had followed up on a previous comment of mine. Sure, blogs (and some forums) have individual RSS comment feeds I could subscribe to and most forums have email notification, but that sure does seem like a lot of maintenance on my part. Plus, it really doesn’t satisfy my desire to have all of my comments consolidated.

Of course, my desire for consolidation is partially due to convenience for me, but also as a convenience for others. It gives people a chance to see what I’ve said in a wide variety of settings.

I thought I was alone in my desire to do this until I ran across a posting about Personal Comment Aggregation by Geof Morris on his The Indiana Jones School of Management blog.

I’m going to give this a try … using del.icio.us to leave myself a trail of breadcrumbs of the places I’ve left comments.

While I have a del.icio.us account, I’ve yet to really use it and I really didn’t want to maintain this type of information in yet another web site. Especially since all it would be capturing is the link info. Ideally I wanted to capture my posting and use it as content for this site since they are my thoughts (Yeah, I’m sure that I’ve lost my rights to my comments on numerous sites in the fine print, but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it).

I’ve been background processing the whole thing for a while and stopped back by Geof’s post tonight to see if there was anything new or any reports on how it was going with the del.icio.us links. Turns out he has written a much more in-depth posting on Personal Comment Aggregation on another of his blogs (I think he has identity issues. Just kidding, as I know he’ll be by once he sees the trackbacks.). His post outlines a much more coherent and thought out description of what the problem (or opportunity) is:

Then, in the comments he and Chris Meller toss around a couple of ideas from a solution point of view.

After reading through it and spending a little time to digest it, I decided that I don’t really need to know about responses to things I’ve said. Sure, it would be great if it could be easily accomplished, but given the complexities and the fact that most threads/conversations die out pretty quickly, I don’t know that it is worth it to even attempt it. In my case, I’m content with just having a simple way to record what I’ve said.

So how to do that? Since one of my primary goals is to also use it as content for this site, it only makes sense to have it integrated into WordPress. Ideally I would capture lots of meta data with custom fields to later come back and parse through in a variety of interesting ways. Unfortunately, it has to be really easy so that I will use it and the chances of me coming back to do anything with it are slim to none. So, scratch the custom fields and let’s stick with a basic Post since it easily captures the What and When and the Where can just be an additional link at the beginning or end of the post. But in an effort to mark it up a little bit in case I ever wanted to go back, I ended up with

Of course, adding the additional markup was going to slow things down and make it more likely that I wouldn’t do it. Then I remembered reading about CopyURLPlus a cool Firefox extension for copying URL and Title info from a page. Turns out it is customizable and you can format the clipboard contents however you want. So, going along with my markup requirements, I ended up with the following customization:

The next step was to identify these posts differently from normal posts. The best that I could come up with was by using the Category functionality. I tossed around a couple of category names like Breadcrumbs, Markers, TrackBacks and LandMarks but finally settled on Postmarks.

A postmark is a postal marking made on a letter, package, postcard or the like indicating the (more or less precise) date and time that the item was delivered into the care of the postal service.
Postmark - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Bada-bing, bada-boom. Now all I need to do to get the content into my blog is highlight the text, right-click and select my custom CopyURLPlus entry, click my Press It bookmarklet to start a new post, paste the content, copy the title into the title field, select the Postmark category, and I’m done. Might not be as easy as I’d like, but certainly doable.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General 

Comments

2 Responses to “Postmarks”

  1. SwoofWare » Postmarks Postscript on December 18th, 2005 11:02 am

    […] OK, I jumped the gun on my Postmarks post. After writing the article of how I planned to manage the various places I’d been, I then decided to actually implement the system. Using Posts to capture the What, When and Where was working just fine. The CopyURLPlus extension worked great and made the whole thing quite easy. However, after I got a couple posts into it (yes, I was retroactively adding things to my Postmarks category), I started encountering entries that I felt awkward about adding. […]

  2. Geof F. Morris on December 18th, 2005 11:16 am

    Well, given that your goals are smaller in scope than mine, this should work for you. I’m not terribly thrilled about having to use a third party like del.icio.us to grab my breadcrumb trail, but it works for now. I imagine that I could whip together a tool on my end to do this for me if I got really wound up about it.

    Even so, I’m still not capturing the full metadata of things on my end, much less getting anything about responses. Baby steps. :)

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