Feeds for subject categories across blogs 

I let my tags and categories problem percolate on its own (in my sleep, and in the middle of my kid's marching band competition last night), then I nudged it along a little today. Expression Engine is a PHP/MySQL blogging tool growing up to become a CMS, and it has a lot of flexibilty. I knew that, and after this weekend I'm really impressed with how it will let me make customizations without getting somebody geekier than me involved in a project like this 9-newsletter thing. (I like being self-sufficient -- probably to a fault.)

My boss told me she wanted readers to be able to subscribe to topics across a number of different blogs or online publications. My first thought was that it would have to be done with tags, and my heart sank because I'm kind of stuck with EE and it doesn't do tags. Not really. There is a user-written module but I'm a little afraid of it.

I was already on the verge of settling with categories, maybe shoving all the content into one differentiated blog, but then I found out that EE will make a feed of a single category or a number of categories. I guess I already knew that. What I didn't know that blew me away was that I can make a template -- all by myself -- that will write an RSS feed containing certain categories of posts from more than one blog within the CMS. Sounds a little OPMLish, doesn't it, except not as boundless. These things will have to converge, I'm sure of it. For right now, I need this up in six weeks, so I'm really happy that a tool we already have can be used. It's a big relief to have it figured out.

Set yourself free 

Identify the latest passage in my literature game. Listen here. I sing for 3 seconds at the end. I completely blame Dave for this, and you can feel free to blame him, too. If he had not suggested that it's OK for people who can't quite sing to record their singing anyway, I'm sure I never would have dreamed of doing it. It's kind of liberating. You should try it, if you like to sing. Or if you like to dance, do a video!

Scared and excited to know what's next 

Do you have one of those crazy "We play anything" stations in your radio market? The one in Chicago is just wild. You might hear Leslie Gore, then Billy Idol, then, well, anything! The format is really ingenious because it keeps you tuned in, wondering what in the world will be next. You think about this and about the "All podcasts, all the time" station in the Bay Area, and it feels like the industry is grasping at straws, desperate, trying anything. I wonder how the podcast station ratings are.

I used to write for a couple different radio trades, mostly business stuff, but it's been so long I don't even know the standard format names anymore.

Chicago radio is always interesting to follow, there's every kind of rock and roll station you can imagine. Here's an elevator pitch in this Radio & Records story selling against "We play anything."

Did you catch that? 

On the new West Wing, Josh's quip in the high-level message meister meeting about Bartlett dining alone? Nobody except Joey got the reference. JFK quote.