Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

How to Include a Daily Digest of Ma.gnolia Links in Your Feeds

I’ve had a couple of folks ask me how I include a daily digest of all of my newly added Ma.gnolia links in my RSS feed, so I thought I would provide a very quick rundown.

FeedBurner is the foundation of the functionality, as it makes it very easy to harness the wealth of feeds provided by Ma.gnolia. Once you’ve signed up for the free service and set up a site, click on the Optimize tab and then select LinkSplicer in the sidebar. At that point just follow the directions they provide you and select the “As a once-a-day summary only”. Once your site is using FeedBurner to serve your feeds, the Ma.gnolia links will show up automatically each night assuming you added at least one new link to your Ma.gnolia account.

Users of WordPress should check out the FeedBurner plugin by Steve Smith, which makes the transition to FeedBurner a smooth one.

Posted in Magnolia Plugin, WordPress & Tagged: Magnolia, rss, Web Development

Kuler Dashboard Widget

Adobe has released a Dashboard widget for Kuler, it’s beautiful, and very useful Web-based color picking app. The widget consumes RSS feeds from the site to display the most downloaded, highest rated and newest color schemes. In addition to the abiliy to search the tags that are used to organize the color palettes, each scheme in the widget provides a direct link to that scheme in Kuler, making it very easy to modify the scheme to fit your needs, and of course save it to Kuler for future reference and sharing amongst the community.

Another great feature is the ability to click a button and have the HEX values of the currently selected scheme copied to your clipboard. If you only want one of the colors, it’s easy to see its HEX in the widget screen without copying it to the clipboard.

If you have yet to play with Kuler, give it a try. It’s well worth the time for every designer…well, as long as you don’t get lost in it for a couple of hours playing with color. Not that I did that or anything… Really.

Hrrm, okay back on track. It is functionality like this that makes Dashboard worthwhile in my book. For those on a Mac, this is yet another reason to include Kuler in your design process. For those on PCs, you may want to drop Adobe a line to encourage them to release the widget for you to consume.

Posted in Design, Design & UI & Tagged: OS X, web design, widgets