Julianna Yau’s blog

For several months, I have been looking for something (anything) which can post a digest of my Ma.gnolia bookmarks to this blog.

My first attempt was with Feedburner’s link splicer, which does that…but only integrates the content into the blog’s feed. Although that’s useful, it isn’t the functionality I want.

Then I tried Ma.gnolia’s own blog posting tool. Although it worked wonderfully, I stopped using it when my host upgraded to ModSecurity 2. This was a problem because modsecurity needs to be deactivated for the xmlrpc file so that Wordpress will accept remote posting, but ModSecurity 2 can only be disabled by the host and for my entire site. This posed a security risk I wasn’t willing to take just to get digest posting of my bookmarks.

I was manually creating digests for a while, but that couldn’t be a permanent solution.

And then I searched through the WordPress plugins again and found that Postalicious had been updated to handle not merely De.licio.us bookmarks, but others…including Ma.gnolia!

At this time, it looks like Postalicious only supports one account from De.licio.us, Ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit or Yahoo Pipes.

You can select:

• the WordPress user acount to attribute the post
• the categories for the post
• whether pingbacks are allowed
• whether comments are allowed
• the minimum number of links a post can have
• the frequency of posting (no limit, max of x bookmarks per post, minimum of x hours between posts, or post once every x days after hh:mm)
• whether to publish after the criteria are met, or keep in drafts
• whether to edit an existing post or start a new one if the author publishes the draft
• allow/disallow a custom list of html in bookmark descriptions
• post only or no bookmarks with a custom list of tags (no spaces, comma separated)
• whether to use bookmark tags as the tags for the post
• whether to always use the same custom list of tags for the post
• date format, based on PHP standards
• post slug template
• post title for single or multiple days
• bookmark syntax (e.g. bookmark link - description - custom text)
• tag syntax
• customizable post template for single or multiple days

Overall, I would say the available options have been very thoroughly considered, and the plugin works wonderfully.

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• Blog updates & review of Ma.gnolia (1)
• Playing catch-up (0)
• A review of Google’s Reader (0)
• Questioning EULAs (0)

You may have noticed some changes to my blog yesterday/today.

Last night, I installed the In-Series plug-in for Wordpress so that I can organize my posts on deconstructing copyright. This works very well, and I have since moved the table of contents to the bottom of the posts to reduce clutter. Now, you can navigate to the previous or next post in addition to any other post in the series. I have also expanded the post titles because I found “part x” was not very helpful in finding an old post for reference.

I have been itching to use Ma.gnolia’s blog posting job feature, which is currently in beta. They had a bit of a system glitch with it over the holidays, but it seems to be up and running again.

The blog posting job allows Ma.gnolia users to send their bookmarks to their blogs as a single post. You do need to link your blog via its API, and Ma.gnolia provides easy-to-follow instructions on how to do that.

Here are the user-definable options for the postings:

• frequency: daily, every three days, weekly or every two weeks
• blog: which blog to post to (currently, only one blog is linked, but it looks like they’re planning to allow for multiple blogs)
• post category: choose a category from your blog which will be assigned to the posts of links (currently, only one category can be assigned to the links)
• post title: whatever you want the post title to be, with the option to add the date of the post
• date format: several options for the format of the date (to be used in the post title)
• leading text: the option to preface the links with some text
• include link to your Ma.gnolia bookmarks (a yes/no option)
• remove CSS styles (a yes/no option)
• the option to include only posts with a specific tag, up to a combination of 3 tags
• the option to include or exclude: descriptions, tags, thumbnails and/or ratings

Because it’s in beta, there are still a few kinks. Overall, I find that it works very well and I’m loving the feature. I was using FeedBurner’s link splicer for a while, but it was problematic because it only shows in the feeds and any email subscriptions sent by FeedBurner. Ma.gnolia, on the other hand, posts the links directly to my blog and the different customization options allow me to control what gets published to my blog and how it shows.

For example, I have started using the tag “blog it” for any bookmarks I want to show on my blog. This means I can bookmark all of the weird and wonderful things I find, but the readers of my blog only see what’s related to my regular blog topics because I setup the job to only send bookmarks tagged with “blog it” to my blog. By having the option of what to include in the blog postings, I can keep the clutter to a minimum by not including a thumbnail of the bookmark or the rating.

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