After experimenting with blogging for some months now, I am convinced of its value and I am moving to the next stage. I've split private stuff from professional and this is the professional one. "The CEO's Blog".
So what does a CEO's blog need? Well, it needs more than the odd blog post with my view on something in it. My work colleagues need to know what I'm up to not just what I think. I need a mini-blog, to complement the core content, for short snippets of information.
This is how my mini-blog works. I have a Twitter account where my ID is @51m0n. On Twitter I signed up to 'follow' @hashtags. Over at the #Hashtags website I checked and found that nobody was using the hashtag #51m0n. This means that whenever I put these characters: #51m0n in a Twitter item (a tweet) it appears here: hashtags.org/tag/51m0n/ and, yes, you've guessed it, this page has an RSS feed on it. The feed is: hashtags.org/feeds/tag/51m0n/.
I then came to this, my lovely ruralnet|online WordPress MU blog and I added an RSS widget to the sidebar and told it to keep an eye on the 51m0n feed from Hashtags.
So, now if I want to place a item in my mini-blog I simply type a tweet in Twitter and include the characters #51m0n. Brilliant!
An extra refinement is that I use Quickeys on my PC and Mac and I've set things up, in Quickeys, so that pressing <Windows Key><Alt>£ automatically types #51m0n and adds the time and date.
Ah, the beauty of Web 2.0.
I like the minblog, but I think it’s incredibly annoying 🙂 that you’re putting the date and time in the content of these ‘posts’. I agree it’s important to give some context to the post in terms of date and time but tHis data already exists (albeit not visible in the way you’re pulling in the RSS feed). All it requires is to reformat the way that the posts are being displayed (see http://communitycarbon.net ) to include a date/time on the end. We can do this with the very powerful, SimplePie and a bit of playing about – but we don’t want to be putting metadata into content
That’s good. May be this should be considered as a ‘Mini-blog prototype’ and we should develop a WPMU widget based on SimplePie that hackers like me can just use!