Escaping from the bare little interrogation room 

Couple weeks ago I was wondering how it would work to style blog posts so some of the feeling of your blog design would be injected into aggregators. Some readers might not like it if bloggers tried to attract their attention. I'm surprised commercial blogs haven't thought of it, at least none that I read is doing it.

(Pssssst! Don't tell them.)

Here's how such a post looks in NewsRiver

If one wanted to do this for real, lots more fussing would have to happen. Some of the things include:

- Fiddling with the styles to see that they render in the major HTML aggregators. For example I've done something with the example that Bloglines doesn't like.

- You'd want to redesign your blog so any graphic element would be more subtle than my ice cream cone. It looks cool once on a page, but a reader would get sick of it repeated for every post when they are reading the blog. With some blogging tools you could have an alternate template so the aggregated posts could look different from those appearing on the blog's web page. Or you could probably do it on OPML Editor blogs and other blogs by modifying the script that generates the feed.

- You would have to put the styles into your blog template because you wouldn't want to go through this for each post:

For one thing, look at the length of the URL it makes for the post link in the OPML Editor blogging tool!

Fun with recursion 

More fun 

Yet more fun 

Still more fun 

Even more fun 

Almost too much fun 

Terminally fun 

Sorry 

Apologies if you sub to my blog feed and you are getting all kinds of dupes. I'll explain what I've been trying to do.

Watched Tom's video 

Check it out! He does a really nice job of explaining some of the technical bits, much better than I'd be able to do, that's for sure. I feel like I know him a little better now. It's a little like meeting an online friend. One thing that always strikes me when I meet someone I've only known online is that I've often completely missed the twinkle in their eye and I almost always end up liking the real person better because of it.

Two installations 

I made a new additional blog to serve as the developers section of the 1.0 site.

This might not be the only way to have two blogs on the same machine, but after some fiddling around it seems to be working:

- I made a new user in XP and put both the application folder and the files folder in the My Documents directory in HER account.

- Used a different e-mail address when I registered for a new account at opml.org.

- It seems you can be logged into both accounts to work on the blog, but apparently you must need to log out of one to use NewsRiver? Does that make sense?

	Two installations  I made a new additional blog to serve as the developers section of the 1.0 site. This might not be the only way to have two blogs on the same machine, but after some fiddling around it seems to be working: - I made a new user in XP and put both the application folder and the files folder in the My Documents directory in HER account. - Used a different e-mail address when I registered for a new account at opml.org. - It seems you can be logged into both accounts to work on the blog, but apparently you must need to log out of one to use NewsRiver? Does that make sense?