External Essentials, Quicklinks and Recommended Items

September 05, 2003 | 6 Comments

I’ve recently added some wonderful sites to my Essential Externals (down there on the right column of my homepage) for your enjoyment. The list is getting rather long, but rather than move it off to some other page or collapse it somehow I think I’ll just let it continue to grow.

There are a few reasons for that, mostly based on my goals for that section of my site, with one goal in particular. Those are goals are:

To give my readers an insight into what I enjoy reading.
To give my readers recommendations to sites I feel they may be interested in.
To give front page props to people I like and respect. I think this is very important.
To help me keep track of great Web sites that I read on a regular basis.

I think it’s working pretty well, even if it is getting a bit long.

I’ve also added the new “Quicklinks to good stuff” section to the sidebar to let me recommend (and archive) those articles I come across on a daily basis. So far, so good.

What I’d like to do now is come up with a more permanent way to store recommendations that fall outside of those two categories. Things like books, movies, video games, music, art, comics or anything else I feel worthy of passing along.

I’ve got several ideas for this, but they’re all a bit problematic. MTAmazon doesn’t work in a blog entry and I’m a bit hesitant to start a new blog just for this anyway. On the other hand I need it to be flexible and easy to maintain.

If anyone has an idea for this, I’d love to hear it.

Filed under: My Sites

Comments

1. Ethan said:

I feel your pain; I’m starting to feel a bit crowded out by the reams of text that I’ve got on the right-hand side of my homepage. I’d definitely be interested to hear what you settle on as a solution. Good luck, Keith!

Posted on September 5, 2003 03:11 PM | #

2. caiuschen said:

Hey, just wanted to say that I enjoy reading your blog. I like how your Quicklinks work, and I think I’ll do something similar for my blog. I’m not sure I understand the requirements how you want to archive your recommendations, but perhaps giving it its own category like your Song of the Week? Good luck on finding a solution.

Posted on September 5, 2003 03:21 PM | #

3. Anne van Kesteren said:

I see you use h2 to identify the title and under that title a list as well. I have this on my own page and I released a new design today, which has a DOM compliant script so you can click on a title to display the list or to hide the list (it currently only works in Mozilla, but it shouldn’t be that hard to let it work in IE).

Posted on September 6, 2003 02:36 AM | #

4. Keith said:

You know Anne, I thought of that and I do think it’s a nice way of doing things - it works great on your site - by the way. It’s just I want to keep those links visable. It’s my way of showing appreciation to those sites (like yours) that I enjoy and well, I’d just feel like they need to “shine through” so to speak.

I’d just hate to hide them, even if it’s getting a bit long.

Posted on September 6, 2003 09:57 AM | #

5. john said:

You CAN use MTAmazon in a blog entry - I detail how here. Look at the link in the last comment for a sample template.

http://www.johnsjottings.com/archives/2003/01/11/macro_magic.html

Posted on September 6, 2003 10:23 PM | #

6. Keith said:

I guess I stand corrected John – I’ll look into that. I do think I figured out another solution, but if I can get MTamazon to work in a post, that would still be very helpful.

Posted on September 8, 2003 10:24 AM | #