I built the List Builder to be reuseable and not to be used exclusively for the [DailyNewsLong]. Now that the Daily News List Blog is officially online it was time for me to stretch out the List Builder's legs and see how it worked on three list-candidate blogs that I read every day.
- Mike Gunderloy's Daily Grind. The king of the daily news and who I blatantly patterned the [DailyNewsShort] after. Sample.
- Steve Rubel's Link posts on his Micro Persuasion blog. Sample.
- Kent Newsome's Morning Reading posts. Sample.
Just so everyone's clear (including Mike, Steve and Kent! :-), the screenshots are from a server on my home office network. I'm not republishing the content anywhere. I'm only testing the reusability of the List Builder on different types of content to see what that content would look like. I'm also trying to determine the intrinsic value of a List Builder application, considering its use with other types of content and for other audiences.
In my thinking, individual permalinks, item-based tagging, retrieving individual items in search results rather than full documents, more granular syndication, and having the capability for new ways of aggregating and reporting are incredibly valuable functions of a List Blog. In the hours that the Daily News List Blog was online yesterday, I searched it several times to answer Community Server Forum questions, and provided a permalink to a news list item that was quickly responded with "that did the trick! Thanks!"
Having written the previous paragraph I realize it's time I fess'd up. A driving force behind the Daily News List Blog is pure unadulterated self-interest. I'm going to use it every day. I hope others use it every day, too, but I built it because I am going to use it every day. One of the secrets to successful applications I've learned in my many years in the business is to build something that saves you (the application's developer, author and user) time and effort. Always build software Looking out for Number One. (Classic book by Robert Ringer I read in the 80's and which is still on my bookshelf.) Selfishness, like greed, is good. (Michael Douglas? Wall Street? Nevermind.) Man, I'm bursting with 1980's pop culture references today! The point is, I know the List Blog is valuable to me and for Community Server users, but I don't know if the value of the List Blog extends beyond that domain. That's something I'd like to find out.
I spent, honestly, no more than fifteen minutes to do all of the testing you see here. I created three Community Server blogs on an office server, one to test Mike's Daily Grind, one for Steve's and one for Kent's. I then setup the weblog accounts in Live Writer (which took more time than the rest of the testing--that idiotic web style checking and downloading...) With the blogs created in Community Server and weblog accounts setup in Live Writer, I copied the contents of a sample post from my newsreader into Live Writer and posted it to the respective list blog. The results are shown in the screenpics below. I didn't change a thing in the original posts with the exception of converting Kent Newsome's items to <LI />'s. I also didn't touch the posts after they were published to their respective List Blog. The List Builder did all of the processing. All I did was post to the blog. Pretty cool.
If Mike, Steve or Kent were to publish to a List Blog, like my process with the [DailyNewsShort], all they would do is either cross-post to the List Blog (a Community Server blog configured with the List Builder CSModule) or post separately from Live Writer, which is what I do with the Daily News when I finally have it right for the day.
A couple of other images to help provide some context of the process and end result. Here's an image of a Daily Grind post copied into Live Writer. From there I posted to the List Blog. Here's an image of what that feed looks like in my newsreader.