Just a couple of quick FYIs about my Mindless Link Propagation linkblog. (and how come the uglier words always win? is it some throw back to our Saxon heritage you think? what happened to the lovely term “low threshold links”?) There has been some debate about whether, when syndicating a linkblog, one should link directly to the item being discussed, or whether <link> should point to the resource being published. (staying consistent with the majority of RSS feeds currently being published) This is actually an old, more general RSS debate about what the link element points to, and not one I wish to revive. (though it is one of the ambiguities cited in the creation of Atom)

The thinking goes that in a linkblog you don’t really want to get to the original blog entry (nothing more then a few scraps of HTML and a pithy comment), but to whatever the blogger is linking to. Thats a good rule of thumb, except when it breaks down. (say you want to comment, or find other items by the same publisher)

On the flip side, simply embedding the link into a content:encoded file makes clever aggregator based service like Hotlinks impossible (or at least hacky and ugly). This is all by way of saying, I using mod_annotate in my MLP RSS file. Seemed obvious to me, but someone exclaimed at it, so I’m making this a public recommendation. (similarly with Atom people seem to be using <link rel=”related” …> [are Atom link types a defined vocabularly or free form?])

While you’re there, you might notice that each entry often has several subjects. dc:subject is one of the few elements which is explicitly allowed to appear multiple times per item. I’m storing these in the keywords field and using a simple keyword splitting plugin. Why? Because I’ve started round tripping my links to del.icio.us using Aaron’s excellent Net::Delicious, my own little libxml based RSS parser, and some grotty Perl which I’m currently not going to inflict upon the world. Anything I post over at del.icio.us should show up here soon, and visa versa.

update 6/19: I’m also producing an Atom feed as described by Mark so I can participate in Hotlinks. I’m also using del.icio.us’s feed per keyword feature to pull an RSS feed of just my Magpie related MLPs for inclusion on the Magpie blog.