I've mostly decided to integrate del.icio.us with my site. Before I do, however, I just wanted to talk out loud and ask for feedback on some things.
It's been interesting because as I've recently tended towards long, link-heavy posts I've gotten varying feedback. Some considered them "information overload", some love the links posts ( 
), and others like the link posts, but don't like the update schedule. If I added many links throughout the day the post kept constantly popping up in people's RSS aggregators because of the update. Since I got those comments I've tried to only update as few times a day as possible in batches rather than updating for individual links. On a related note, Erik, linkblogger extraordinaire, would often link to my link posts, but if I wound up initially having a link post with only a few ok links but later filling it with tons of great links Erik would pass it by. That leads me to believe that his aggregator doesn't handle updated posts the same way -- maybe if a post has been deleted in the aggregator it doesn't show up again if it's been updated. (Erik, care to comment?)
So, one of my biggest questions has to do with update times. Should I pull the links from del.icio.us only once a day, in which case I'm likely to have "stale" links by the time they wind up on my site, or maybe as many as four times a day (of course, only updating if there are new links)? The bigger problem here, however, is that del.icio.us does everything in UTC, while I'm in Eastern time. I'd like to work with it on Eastern time, so if I ask for links for "today" or "yesterday" (giving it the actual date, of course), I want it to give me "my" day, not Greenwich's day.
The other main problem is that the format is constraining. A lot of times I want to have something like:
or I want to have some descriptive text before I give the link. You can see my most recent link post for examples of things that would be impossible to do within del.icio.us's format.
Finally, it limits you to 255 (I assume) characters of "extended" text. Sure, if I have anything lengthy to say it should probably be put in its own post. But 255 is rather short, and given that I'm going to be sticking "via" URLs (among others) in my extended entries, it's even shorter.
By the way, hands down the feature I love the most about del.icio.us is the pop-up poster. Though, for some reason it works as a pop-under for me.
I just got an e-mail from the Gap (I bought from them online years ago) telling me they have a new "stress-free" line of clothes, for which "liquids bead up and roll off [and] stains don't take hold". I'm interested to hear how they did that.
Or at least their web-developers have. I just noticed they've redesigned their web site and now finally use get instead of post for their lookup. Their URL should be yet simpler, but it's better than it was.
The New York Times has an article entitled Single and Paying for It (via Steve). It's framed in terms of the gay marriage debate, but much of it is more generally applicable.
Though most people would agree that these distinctions are arbitrary and unfair, as a society we tend not to notice that breaks for people who are married translate into penalties for those of us who are not.
Whenever you're arguing for benefits on one side, remember that it's often essentially the same as arguing for pentalties on the other. I made a similar point regarding affirmative action.
Of course, I could never support gay marriage. But I don't think there should be a constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union between a man and a woman. Our constitution is far more concerned with process than it is about social issues, and such an amendment would violate that spirit.
Rather, I think the government should get out of the marriage business altogether. Penalties or bonuses for singles or couples will always be arbitrary. Plus, the fact that you need a license from the state to get married seems strange to me. I don't know why the state needs to be concerned with whether its citizens are married or not. It seems it should only know about our names, where we live, and who our assets should go to in the event of death.
As for other things that depend on the definition of marriage, such as insurance benefits, it seems that in the absence of any government mandate one way or the other, insurance companies would be free to decide what to do. They'd be subject to market forces, which may result in insurance companies generally deciding in a way I wouldn't like, but I'd much prefer that to the government mandating it. Similar arguments can be made for how to handle things like splitting assets in the case of divorce. I'd be interested to hear if anyone could present issues I haven't thought of.
On a more philosophical note, I question people's motivations regarding marriage. As a Christian, I know why marriage has meaning, and who it's limited to. When I put on my atheist hat, I question why people consider marriage significant at all, and any definition of "marriage" simply becomes arbitrary. In the absence of God, the ephemeral certainty of an "oath" and the uncertain nature of "love" would make me question what marriage even is. Greg Bahsnen used to say (paraphrasing) "I don't know why atheists get married", or similarly, have funerals. If you take offense to that, you're missing his philosophical point.
Monday, January 26, 2004
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