why linkspams?

[sciatrix]

This post is for my version of a January posting meme, aimed at daily posts through January (and a little into February). You can suggest topics here.

implicated2 and wanderingnork wanted to know how I make linkspam posts, source links, etc. The answer to that is both really simple--I just collect all the interesting links that cross across my feeds and tuck them away into a list with snippets describing them as I find them--and a little more complicated.

I often pull conversations from my Dreamwidth reading feed and interesting pieces from Metafilter when I'm doing this. Sometimes I pick up links from Twitter, too; my twitter is the sort of place where I often see interesting biology links passed around, because I mostly use Twitter to talk with other biologists. Sometimes I open links in a new tab and forget where I found them until I'm hastily trying to clear things out with a linkspam. Sometimes I go googling weird shit that occurs to me at odd intervals, or things I've heard about via reading. Tumblr used to be a big source of links for me, too, but lately I've been hanging out less over there.

I generally do not specifically go looking for links to share over here, although I do try to include a fair bit of Dreamwidth-specific conversational blogging when I construct these things. (Mostly that is because I'm enjoying my time over here and I am hoping to encourage more people to slide over onto DW. It feels like a good trade, especially with the conversations I have been having here this year.)

I do sometimes go looking specifically for links to make Metafilter FPPs (front page posts) with, usually when I've just found something new offline and want to turn it into an online discussion. MeFi is a hell of a bigger site than my little DW blog, and I can usually count on it to spawn an interesting conversation. (I have the same name on Metafilter, but you can't look at user profiles without an account. If you want to see the kinds of things I've done there, here's a list of all the posts I've written over there which should be accessible to everyone.) But a Metafilter FPP is also going to be much more focused and thoughtful than my scattered linkspams, which take less writing. And if something has been linked already on Metafilter, I don't usually do another post on it unless it's been at least a few years, which is not the case for linkspams.

I can't really imagine finding something I read and enjoyed and not including it in a linkspam here. Probable exceptions include locked content from someone that isn't accessible to readers or anything that has a "please don't share" kind of disclaimer on it. Mostly I just assume that anyone reading this blog regularly either has as eclectic a sense of what's interesting as I do or is capable of scrolling past anything they don't care about. I do read or glance over a lot of things that aren't as promising as I thought when I clicked on them, and those I tend not to pass along to you guys. But by and large, I just toss useful things up here on the philosophy that if no one else wants to see, at least I can find things later.

Comments

[wellthisisnice]

Since you said you tuck them away into a list as you find them, I'm now interested in where you draft DW linkspams. Do you have a private DW post to dump links into, or do you use some external website/software/etc. like Google Docs or Calmy Writer?

[sciatrix]

I usually use Sublime, which is a text editor that is technically not free but which lets you use the "trial" edition completely indefinitely if you just keep on requesting not to pay. It's useful for coding, which is what I picked it up for, but it is also really nice for drafting posts with HTML--especially because it automatically saves everything you write upon windows being closed, whether or not you have ever remembered to name the file, and also it will remember exactly which tabs you had open the last time you opened it. So I have a Metafilter FPP drafts file and a DW linkspam file and, say, a file with a draft for that post on why I love true crime? It will remember that and save it whenever I open the program.

I use other things for drafting pieces when I won't be coding my own HTML--Scrivener works a treat for drafts that have good Rich Text editors, which DW does not--but for this use, Sublime is my buddy. At some point I will actually pay the nice people, but it's pretty spendy.

[wanderingnork]

This is super interesting! I'll start saving links to interesting things I read floating around here and the rest of the internet. In the meantime, I continue to love your linkspam posts. :D

Any advice on which days are good to post, or is it just a matter of "pick a day any day and stay consistent"?

[sciatrix]

I like to just pick a day and stay consistent with it, mostly because otherwise I forget to keep going. But I don't even think there's any such thing as a "good day" to post; I think that you ideally want to pick a day that you don't have a whole lot of other linkspammers going, but otherwise you can go nuts. No one is going to want or be able to read everything you're bringing to the table all at once anyway; I usually expect people to pick over things and to get comments off and on for a few days after I post something as folks find the time to have a look at the interesting little tidbits.