I have been wanting to add some sort of WordPress Asides plugin to my blog for a while now. “Asides” are links with or maybe without short descriptions to things I found interesting on the net. They don’t warrant a whole blog post, but serve as a list to things I found worth reading or looking at.
I looked at all kinds of implementations from Photo Matt’s Asides, Coldforged , Yet Another Asides, Mini-Posts, Not Really Asides, as well as just using a separate “asides” post category. Then it struck me that I could kill two birds with one stone.
I have become a huge fan of digg.com through their podcast digg nation (also available free through iTunes). I have also dabbled in del.icio.us social bookmarking. Contributing to digg and delicious basically serve the same function as the asides I wanted.
Well now I have my del.icio.us and my diggs on my home page. I went ahead and added this while upgrading to WordPress 2.0.
To me this is even better than any of the plugins or hacks, because I don’t have to open up my blog to post one. I can add them right from the browser while surfing through two great Firefox extensions, Digg This! and del.icio.us extension. 
To add these asides lists to my WordPress template, I only had to add a couple snips of JavaScript available from each website.
- del.icio.us linkrolls JavaScript
- For digg look at the bottom of your profile page for “add this feed to your website.”
No muss, no fuss.
