learnandteachonline.com

A couple of weeks ago I remarked on some conversation around the net about the trend toward reading blog posts only in aggregators, with readers never visiting the website. I said it's like they are coming to a meeting in a bare little interrogation room instead of sitting in my living room in the best chair and sipping a cup of tea.

I was wondering how it would work to style blog posts so some of the feeling of your blog design would be injected into aggregators. Then yesterday I tried it on my OPML blog.

Here's how such a post from my OPML blog looks in the oPML Editor's built-in NewsRiver aggregator

If one wanted to do this for real, lots more fussing would have to happen. Some of the things include:

- Fiddling with the styles to see that they render in the major HTML aggregators. For example I've done something with the example that Bloglines doesn't like.

- You'd want to redesign your blog so any graphic element would be more subtle than my ice cream cone. It looks cool once on a page, but a reader would get sick of it repeated for every post when they are reading the blog. With some blogging tools you could have an alternate template so the aggregated posts could look different from those appearing on the blog's web page. Or you could probably do it on OPML Editor blogs and other blogs by modifying the script that generates the feed.

- You would have to put the styles into your blog template because you wouldn't want to go through this for each post:

Some readers might not like it if bloggers started doing this, because maybe they like having all posts look equal and neutral with none trying to attract attention. I'm surprised that people who make commercial blogs haven't thought of it, at least none that I read is doing it.

(Pssssst! Don't tell them.)