How and why of Rising Slowly
When I began thinking of how to revive Rising Slowly, my first thought was: "Can I really be bothered?"
One of the things that troubled me most during its first incarnation was that much of the time, each post didn't need very much content. After all, all you can do most of the time is simply point people to a link and tell them what the weather angle is. I simply don't subscribe to the method used on many weblogs which involves cutting and pasting whole chunks of the destination link's text - what's the point? Let people follow the link and read it there if they want to.
The simple act of trying to string out lots of early Rising Slowly posts with additional comment was time-consuming and harder than you might think. It was also tough to be that opinionated about something as universal and uncontrollable as the weather.
So when the time came to re-invent RS, my thoughts turned to slimming it down. I wanted to eliminate the need for me to waste time writing unnecessary blurb, and cut the time it took to add new content.
My solution was to use the tools that are out there already. A Flickr feed for the photos, sucked in automagically from the RS pool - that was easy. Then a del.icio.us feed for the link content. I decided that all most weather-related stories needed was a link and a one-liner from me; I could use that one liner to provide quotes, additional context, or gags, depending on the link and on my mood.
I didn't want to clutter up my personal del.icio.us space with weather links though, so I set up a fresh del.icio.us account just for use with RS. Then I downloaded Cocoalicious and the associated bookmarklet (search the page for "1.0b38" to find it) and added that to Camino. To really speed things up, I gave the bookmarklet a shortcut key ("rs").
To add a new link from my browser, I just hit Command+L to highlight the URL in the address bar, type "rs" and hit return. The page is promptly opened in Cocoalicious with title, URL and selected text (if any) all inserted for me. All I need do is add extra comment, some tags, and hit Post.
This way, each new link takes a few seconds. Photos are pulled in as and when they are posted to the group. It's all very minimal, very quick, and very shortlived.
What do you think of this approach? Is anyone visiting the site often? How does the links feed work out? I'd love to hear any comments you've got on the new approach.
Labels: work
