Writer River

I try and follow as many technical writing blogs as I can but beyond the dedicated blogs there are other good sources of information and ideas out there. Finding these additional articles can be tricky as they can be found in a huge number of different sources.

To help with this Tom Johnson set up Writer River as a way to allow anyone (with an account) to post links to interesting blog posts and articles. The website has been running for a whlie now and continues to provide links to useful and topical articles.

I monitor an RSS feed of the website and whilst that is adequate it does mean that I can go a week or more without checking which can lead to a build of too many links to check. That usually means I skim the link titles rather than click through them all and the likelihood is that I’ve missed something that may have been useful.

So I’m delighted to hear that Writer River now has an auto-updating Twitter feed. Every link posted on Writer River will be pinged over to Twitter, and as I’m following Writer River on Twitter, I’ll see the links as they are added, increasing the chances of me taking a few minutes to click through to the linked website.

Time will tell but this is either a great use of social networking tools, allowing me to keep bang up to date and probably meaning I won’t skip any links, or another challenge to my time keeping, a quick check of Twitter during a context-switch* moment at work may lead to a longer break than I had intended?

We’ll see but, as ever, Tom continues to push his ideas forward to the benefit of us all.

Comments

  1. Yes, WriterRiver is a boon!

    I decided to stick with RSS feeds and monitor them daily using netvibes. Other TW aggregated feeds I find useful are:
    – Recent additions to the EServer TC Library at http://tc.eserver.org/recent_rss.xml
    – Tom Johnson’s shared items in Google Reader at http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user/14956448268706131592/state/com.google/broadcast
    – The weekly links roundup at http://www.dmncommunications.com/weblog

  2. Gordon,

    Thanks for the note. The auto-updating Twitter service is easy to set up. Just go to Twitterfeed.com and enter an RSS feed and a Twitter account. Every hour or so, the Twitterfeed service looks at your RSS feed. If there’s a new post, it sends the title or description (or both) across the Twitter account you specify.

    Kai, it surprised me to see that someone is actually following my shared Google Reader. I often mark posts are Shared and then later submit them to Writer River when I read them in full. I can mark posts as shared on my BlackBerry, but not post them to Writer River (at least not as easily).

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