Changing how I do the Unblogged Bits

So as noted elsewhere, I’m testing changes in how I’m generating the “Unblogged Bits” parts of my blog, where I archive here the links I share in Google Reader (and the copious notes from them).

The previous tool I’ve been using is a WP plugin called Digest Post, with mods per here. This has worked okay … but has recently been more and more prone to spitting up and giving me a bunch of bad links. Irksome. Given that it’s a modified version of a v0.1 plug-in, that’s not wildly surprising.

What I’m trying out is a plugin called Recommended Reading, which looks to do just what the doctor ordered and is actively supported. I have jut two pieces of heartburn with this, which I need to follow up on.

It’s currently a manual process. The plugin is really sort of designed to create a sidebar of GReader entries — which quite a number of other plugins do, too. It’s managed by just pulling in a widget. If you want to put your GReader entries on a page or post, then you can put a shortcode entry there.

Therein lies the heart of both problems. Creating said posts has to be done manually. That means I can’t just have the Unblogged Bits post generate automatically at 5:30pm local time (as it does now); I have to manually create a post at some point — maybe earlier, maybe later, maybe not until the next day if I forget.

A feature to autogenerate a post is on the development list, though.

My second concern is persistence. The Digest Post process actually copies all those links and comments in. The Recommended Reading plugin relies on that shortcode to generate the post contents. The actual post content, though, just has that shortcod. Which tells me that if I ever decide I want to stop using that plugin, or if it becomes unsupported or fails or something, then all those Unblogged Bits posts that relied on the plugin will go blank.

That, from an archivist standpoing, is NFG.

So I’m not completely sold on this approach yet. I’m going to engage the plugin author and see if I’m understanding things properly, and figure things out from there.