Reintroducing Newstangle, or How I learned to stop worrying and love my blog

Let’s skip the usual rambling, expository introduction and get to the lists:

1. Delicious is dying. Or it isn’t. Or it is. Depends on who you ask, I suppose.
2. I like saving and tagging and sharing links. You may have noticed I worked for a company that made some tools to do that sort of thing.
3. I’m having a hard time trusting any of the also-ran social bookmarking sites with my data.
4. For a long time now, I’ve had intentions to implement some form of WordPress “Asides” on my blog, to use in conjunction with the “Press This” bookmarklet for light linkblogging.

The desired outcome:

1. A handsome little way to display Asides on my blog. For the sake of this discussion, let’s just call all the “Asides” posts something like “Newstangle.”
2. All of my Delicious links, minus some outdated stuff, imported to WordPress as posts with their tags intact.
3. Some light repair and merging of tags.
4. A page displaying all my Newstangle posts and tags in some sort of useful, browsable way.
5. Perhaps a search box just for the Newstangle content.
6. To send out automatic-ish tweets when I post a Newstangle link that lead to the link in question, and not my blog post about it.
7. To point Newstangle.com at the Newstangle links over here.

So far: I’m done with steps 1, 2, 3, and 7. Halfway done with 4, really.

Not bad for an over-coffee-and-breakfast project, right?

Ingredients:

• AsideShop for a pretty easy way to implement a version of Asides without messing around with templates. I’m a sucker for any plugin that lets me use tokens like %post_permalink% with my own markup, rather than getting too deep into PHP copy/paste missions.
• The particular Delicious to WordPress Importer I used was an updated version of this one, and predated this other one, which even comes with a handy theme to make it more like Delicious. Your mileage will definitely vary.
• Batch Cat to help clean up some of the damage I did importing more than 2,500 links to my default post category, which I actually use.
• Tag Managing Thing, an oldie-but-a-goodie plugin for editing, merging, and deleting post tags.
• And when I get around to adding some interesting tag listing ont he Newstangle category page, I might use some variation of the cool back-of-the-book index-style Archives template that came with my new Basic Maths theme.

It remains to be seen, of course, if I can stick with it, posting short links and notes on a regular basis, mixing in longer posts — perhaps about something other than this blog at some point — more frequently than I have of late.

Now then. What’s all this I hear about Flickr?