ITauthor

Tom Johnson has rejigged the Writer River site again to use a service called Publish2. This site is really just another link aggregation site but it has some features that make it really useful. The great thing about it is the bookmarklet that adds a sidebar to whatever Web page you’re reading. From this sidebar you can add an item to your personal list of page links, stored by Publish2.

The other things you can do with the sidebar are:

• Add the link to any of the newsgroups you belong to.
  Tom has set up a “Technical Communication” newsgroup and it’s the links that get added to this newsgroup that appear on Writer River. This is great because it means you can have your own personal list and then, from that, choose who you share particular links with.
• Send a tweet about the page.
  Rather than going to your twitter client and tweeting about this separately – just write your tweet in the sidebar.
• Publish the link to your blog or to delicious.
  The sidebar has WordPress and delicious integration. In my case, I want to have my own “What I’m Reading” list in my WordPress blog. So I have a “What I’m Reading” category already set up and I have Publish2 set to select this as the default category. The good thing about this is that if Publish2 disappeared tomorrow I wouldn’t lose all my “What I’m Reading” links they way I would if I was just adding details dynamically to my site by pulling in information from the RSS feed for my list at Publish2. There is a Publish2 JavaScript widget that you can add to any Web page to pull information down from Publish2 if you want to do it that way. But by actually posting to my blog from the sidebar it means that data is saved to my WordPress database as well as to Publish2’s database.
  

So here’s how I add things to my “What I’m Reading” list. Note: the way I used to populate this list is described in this post – but it was massively complicated compared to this method.

1. When I've read a page I think other tech writers might be interested in I just go to my Bookmarks list, click the Publish2 link and fill out the sidebar form that's displayed.
2. I type in a description of what I like about the page in the Public Comments box.
3. I select the check box for the Technical Communication newsgroup.
4. The check box for twitter is selected by default - I just add some tweet text.
5. In the Also add this link to section I select the check box for ITauthor.com.  My What I'm Reading category is already selected - I just have to copy some text from the Public Comments box and that becomes a link to the article in the resulting blog post.
6. I click Save and I'm done.
   
   My blog's updated with a new post, Writer River also gets a new link entry and a tweet gets sent out to my twitter followers.
   
   Quick, easy and kills three birds with one stone. Brilliant!