This post was written in reply to keasone.de kind of survey of website (and web2.0 elements) usage | Initially, the questions were asked in German, but due to the international audience over here, I am going to translate them to English.

English: Do you use Social Bookmarking/Networking pages such as Digg, Yigg, Mister Wong or Del.Icio.Us? If so, which?

German: Nutzt Du Social Bookmarking/Networking Seiten wie Digg, Yigg, Mister Wong oder Del.Icio.Us? Wenn ja, welche?

On my website h4x3d.com I am using digg, technorati, del.icio.us (hate to spell that!), sphere.com, blogmarks.net, ma.gnolia.com and furl to offer my users all the social bookmarking tools that are currently popular. Mr. Wong is not yet available in English, so a strict no-go for me. Personally I only use digg and del.icio.us.

English: Do you watch videos on video portals such as YouTube, Sevenload or DailyMotion? If so, what kind of Videos?

German: Schaust Dir Videos bei Videoportalen wie YouTube, Sevenload oder DailyMotion an? Wenn ja, was für Videos guckst Du Dir meistens an?

I do not waste time on YouTube, because for some reason it is extremely slow whenever I am trying to find something. DailyMotion is great, but Videos you watched one day are gone the other. I used to collect Simpsons videos on the internet, but with one swift move, DailyMotion deleted them all. From time to time I watch the remaining FamilyGuy episodes on bolt.com. Actually that’s only because I am lazy, since I do own the original FG DVDs.

English: Do you know/use Flickr?
German: Kennst bzw. nutzt Du Flickr?

Who does not know flickr? I am using flickr to share all my pictures from university, trance events or whatever I capture using my crappy cellphone camera. When I need to post newly accquired vinyl covers, I use the flickr API which comes built in with some cool plugin in Wordpress. Really makes posting fun.

English: What do you think of services such as Twitter or Frazr?
German: Was hältst Du von Diensten wie Twitter oder Frazr?

I have been using Twitter only for testing their API (it’s actually only a RSS Feed…) and I am not using it daily. I think twitter is great waste of time and can be addictive for some people. Facebook offers similar twitter abilities. I don’t know Frazr. Cool name though! Oh btw. Alex, I deleted you from my friends list (it’s empty now), not as I don’t like you :p but as you were filling up my LifeStream (stupid RSS-Feed)!

English: How many RSS-Feeds are you subscribed to?
German: Wie viele RSS-Feeds hast Du abonniert?

Between 4 and 5, it really depends on the quality of content. I am subscribed to LifeHacker’s RSS-Feed and love it. However, sometimes it can become quite spammy, as they post 9–10 times a day. RSS-Feeds are a good way of catching up with other websites’ development, but again: also a great waste of time. I have subscribed to my own RSS-Feed in order to check if there are errors from time to time. I am using Feedburner to direct my posts to Feeds.

English: Do you read them daily?
German: Liest Du die alle täglich?

No, not really. Only if I need to waste time..

English: How many blogs do you maintain/author?
German: In wie vielen Weblogs bloggst Du? (Eigene oder Mitautor)

Only h4x3d.com and some minor small blogs that are not yet ready for public release.

English: Do you comment on other blogs? If so, what?
German: Kommentierst Du in anderen Blogs? Wenn ja was?

Yes, sure. Whenever I find something useful and commentworthy I leave my 5cent.

(there are more questions, but as I have to go now and have loads of other things to do today I am not going to comment on those. Thanks to keasone for throwing this stick to me, and hereby I am throwing back.. enjoy)

Read on | Website usage (web 2.0 related) questioned / Stckchn-beta-20

I am now using the Wordpress Loop to output my asides, details below

Okay, so first of all to clarify things, I am not going to actually code or build a (new) sideblog plugin for wordpress here, I am going to comment on existing sideblog plugins and compare them. In regard to the promising title, I will than come up with a sideblog alternative, which will (definatly) work on everyone’s blog.

You probably wonder how people display those small articles about their daily ramblings, quick notes or links they have found on the internet on their blogs. You might also have read something about ‘asides’ in Wordpress on other blogs.

In order to display those miniblog articles (or sidenotes/asides) on your Wordpress blog, you could either

1. Use a special sideblog plugin (examples listed below)
2. Hard code a piece of content into your theme template
3. Include a php file which is updated externally
4. Do a mixture of all those three things (which I do)

1. Existing Sideblog or Miniblog plugins for Wordpress

At first I have tried out KatesGasis’ sideblog (v.3), but for me it did not work out like the author described his plugin. The sideblog showed, but the pages however disappeared and my blog was creating random 404 errors. Some months later, other bloggers were also facing this problem. Finally, the 404 issue would be addressed by the plugin author himself. Future versions of the Sideblog plugin were released, but without any effect. It is currently in built 3.6 or so, but still does not work for me. It is rather nice and simple, but without a fix to the 404 issue, worthless for on-site use.

The next plugin I have tried out was Miniblog. The original author of this plugin was Ryan Poe, but he gave up the coding on this project and turned it over to Joe. After some juggling through the right site, finding the right version and getting it installed correctly (the docs were missing in the first zip file, which made the plugin display dodgy) I tried it out and was quite satiesfied. The tagging system (simpletagging) still worked, no 404s, pages were loading fine and the sideblog showed. After having posted another entry to my miniblog, it also showed up. How gross, because I set it to display only one record. Fiddling with the source code solved this problem, but another problem was added: In combination with the in-series plugin (by REM state), entries that are part of a series are shown above the miniblog entries.

2. Quite confusing, and annoying. Since I did not want to drop the in-series plugin, I decided to hard-code my asides into my theme templates. Soon I was annoyed as well, also I did not have an archiving function of my posts as I was adding them in direct html code to the template.

3. I used the following code to ease the update process by only having to edit one external file, rather than navigating all the way up to my theme folder:

This of course was also no solution to the missing asides/sideblog problem, as the archiving option was missing.

4. Recently I came across a plugin called Front Page Excluded Categories, Instructions and FAQ can be found on the official wordpress.org website. It does what its name suggests: Exclude on specific category from showing on your blog frontpage. I figured out (nothing new to some I guess), that I could use this to hide my asides category from the frontpage. Then use the categories feed and re-insert this RSS-Feed into the main site template (theme) using another RSS-Feed plugin or some magpie-feed code. Voila, problem blown away! It works out of the box. You can use a RSS Importing Plugin such as Friends RSS Aggregator or FirstRSS or (what I am currently using) jRSS. If your feed is getting “douged” up, run it through Feedburner and import the (cleaned) feedburner RSS.

This guy (geeked.org) had a similar idea, but did not get it to run.

have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?>
 

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(you need to fix the php tags though! e.g. move the brackets. I need a better code highlighter, seriously!)

Read on | Building a Wordpress sideblog (plugin) that works