THERE’S A MODULE FOR THAT!
I’ve been tinkering a little under the hood of this blog/website. As some of you may know, this site is based on the awesome Drupal CMS. I was browsing some blogs and came across an interesting ratings and recommendation service called Outbrain. A little digging and sure enough, There’s a Drupal module for that! I installed the module and played with the widget settings from my Outbrain account. Outbrain wins extra love for supporting openid, which is my identity verification method of choice. It turns out that the recommendation engine’s recommendations for my blog were either irrelevant (in my humble opinion) politically charged (I have no idea how that happens as I remain a blogging centrist politically) or just links to my other content, which is easy enough to find without the recommendation engine’s obtrusiveness. So I turned it off and went with the ratings engine alone for the time being. Maybe when my blog content fills out more and/or the recommendation engine becomes a little more sophisticated I’ll give it another whirl. Meanwhile, please rate my individual blog posts by clicking on the appropriate star.
Another change that’s been a long time coming is to abstract my blog feed to Feedburner. It’s good practice to do this in case your native blog URL changes for any reason. It’s the blogger’s version of a universal phone number (Unified Feedopathy?) Say you want to change your web address or even just want to switch blogging platforms, having your subscriber base fetching your feed from Feedburner or Friendfeed means they don’t have to suffer a link breakage. You just have to repoint your Feedburner feed to the new location. To make a long story short, there’s a module for that too! I just installed the Feedburner module, which integrates nicely with Feedburner’s feed flare and your own site’s content types. Let me know if you are experiencing problems with my site feed.