dive into mark

Heather did it well. Michael does it. Leslie does it every day. (Dean does it with his dog, but never mind that.) As of today, I’m doing it too.

It’s a B-link. Well, Heather called it currently reading. Michael Barrish calls his choice cuts. Leslie simply calls hers elsewhere. It’s a link to a site, seemingly random, generally obscure, quirky, maybe not the sort of thing you’d expect a person to link to. (In Dean’s case, what changes is not the link but the picture — of his dog, in this case. There are certainly other variations.) Regardless, it’s set apart from the main content; it’s its own thing really. A blog within a blog.

It reminds me of the B-side of those old record singles (yeah, yeah, I’m showing my age, I’m 29, damn it — no, really). Anyway, it reminds me of that — the A-side is the hit, the song you bought the record for, the song they’ll sing at their concerts and that everybody hums along with on the radio. The B-side is a throwaway, or an experiment, or a mystery, or a goof. Maybe banal, maybe a nice surprise, maybe a sleeper hit. You never can tell with the B-side.

Hence, B-link.

Anyway, I’ve added it to my home page, along the navigation bar, below the blogroll. I’ll try to rotate it daily. There will be no archive; blink and you’ll miss it.

Now, to bring this back into the realm of the topical: how to add it to my RSS feed? I am increasingly aware (according to my site statistics) that many, many people rely solely on my RSS feeds to follow my site. Daily hits on my RSS feeds outweigh hits to my HTML pages. Yeah, some of those are once-an-hour unattended daemons, but many (most) are not. Some people subscribe to my full-content feed and may never visit my site at all. Even those reading excerpts, if they click through to my site, it will be to the permanent archive page, not the home page, and I was thinking of putting this B-link just on my home page. (My archive pages have a very abbreviated navigation bar, and I’d like to keep it that way.)

So we need a new tag. The RSS 2.0 spec isn’t quite frozen yet; can we squeeze this in under the wire? There’s already a link tag that points back to my weblog. That’s the A-link, right? The site everybody reads, the site everybody links to. So how about a B-link tag?

<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>dive into mark</title>
<link>http://diveintomark.org/</link>
<blink>http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/</blink>
<description>A lot of effort went into making this effortless.</description>
…

I’ve added it to my experimental RSS 2.0 feed. Let’s see if it catches on.

Update: Dave has created the blogChannel module to hold the blink tag and several others. Deployed. Namespaces rock!

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:blogChannel=”http://backend.userland.com/blogChannelModule”>
<channel>
<title>dive into mark</title>
<link>http://diveintomark.org/</link>
<blogChannel:blink>http://www.ceafinney.com/subjunctive/</blogChannel:blink>
<description>A lot of effort went into making this effortless.</description>
…

Clarification (for Laughing Meme): it’s spelled blink, but it’s pronounced bee’-link. I can see it now, at the dinner table tonight:

D: I’m so proud of you, honey. You’ve added a blink tag to RSS.

M: No, it’s pronounced bee-link.

D: Blink.

M: Beeee-link.

D: B’link.

M: Close enough.

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