I have added some changed to the blog which you may or may not have noticed. I started adding linked posts to the blog. These are similar to what John Gruber does over at Daring Fireball. Basically, these are links to external articles that I comment briefly on. The reason I’m creating these is that I noticed I post a lot of links on twitter but rarely have enough characters to comment on them how I’d like. I figure my blog is the perfect place to do this but didn’t want just a series of extremely short normal blog posts. That’s when I decided to implement asides.

I found a plugin that will allow you to implement and style your asides without editing WordPress’ loop. It’s a great plugin because the only file I need to edit is my stylesheet so that I can style my asides as I see fit. That still didn’t solve my problem with having the post link to the actual article on my blog or my feeds. Because I didn’t want to hack my theme files, I settled on two plugins that would bring me that functionality. The first is the Linked List plugin. This is technically all I should need but, as I said, I wanted to implement these things without editing any theme files (besides the stylesheet of course). So far, I have styled asides and if you click on a linked post in my feed it will bypass my site and take you directly to the article. I needed one more plugin to link the actual post on my site to the external article. This is where the Page Links To plugin came in handy. I designate the URL the permalink should redirect to and it takes care of the rest.

So when you see posts like the one in the screenshot below, that’s a linked post. You can click on the external link icon at the end and it will take you to the article I’m referencing. If you are reading an external article from a feed reader, just click on the feed title and it will take you there.

Of course, right now I have no way of showing, in a feed, that it is a linked post, but I would think it would be pretty obvious if I’m talking about an article but there is no link within the text. I’ll see if I can find a way to make that more clear from within the feed. If you have any suggestions on how to that, I’m open to them.