PowerBlogs.Com Development

Post Chaining

Post Chaining is maturing. At Eugene Volokh's request I added a bulk post chain forging page, which should make creating post chains of content that wasn't originally chained together much easier. I also added some documentation, though it could certainly use some improvement — it's really as much an attempt to get people to use it as a description of what post chaining is and what it's used for.

I'm really excited by post chaining, though. I've spent too much time jumping into the middle of discussions by following Instapundit's links only to wonder what the person wrote afterwards but not being inclined to read their entire front page to find out. I really think that post chaining will improve the usefulness of the blogosphere if its use takes off — while frequent new material is one of the great strengths of the blogosphere, it's also a weakness in that it can be difficult to keep up. Post Chaining helps to alleviate that problem without weakening the strength of constant posting and instant updates.

Menu Modifications

I've modified the post composition menu a bit to shorten the words (so that it's more friendly to small monitors) and also to add an Entities™ menu®. Now, whether you want to say $100, £55.84, ¥11,003 or €82.22, powerblogs is there for you.

(note: neither Entities nor menu is actually a trademark of anyone that i know of)

Syndication Preferences

I've added a new page to the Prefs tab which allows one to control various aspects of the syndication features (Email lists, RSS, etc). It's now possible to control whether the various syndication options are used, and in the case of RSS, displayed.

Also, I've added a content template to the full content RSS feed to faciliate sticking advertisements in the full content RSS (that one was requested by Dean Esmay).

Finally, I've aggregated all of the syndication options into a single variable for the sidebar templates: [$SyndicationList$]. You'll have to reload your theme or add this to the appropriate sidebar manually, but once you do you'll never have to manually adjust the syndication links again.