I’ve wanted to apologise to Alec Muffett for some time about a blog post I wrote back in January ’08. Called “Links for DD-MM-YYYY Not Likely” it questioned the effectiveness of “Links for” type posts to connect with your readership in a meaningful way; as well as being a response to Alec’s post “A disappointed (occasional) reader…“.
This has become especially ironic as eight months later I followed up with “Setting up del.icio.us blog posting on blogs.sun.com“, a post showing in detail how to configure delicious, the online bookmark system, to post entries to Roller Weblogger (and specifically the implementation powering the Sun blog server). To top it all I’ve become a regular provider of “Links for” posts since then too.
Furthermore I’ve found the “Links for” type post a useful way to communicate in a conversational manner with my readers. It allows me to post short opinion based entries to my blog, giving me a chance to have my say when circumstances wouldn’t or shouldn’t allow a longer blog post, as well as improving the overall cadence of updates, which has suffered when I’ve been time constrained.
I actually gave Alec a call a couple of months ago and apologised in person; I wrote this blog post after being reminded by Carolyn’s comment that I had a responsibility to put things straight online too.