Drupal and the Blogging Starter Checklist, Part 3

Continued from last time: a look at Rajesh Setty's Blogging Starter Checklist, with a particular eye toward applying its advice to blogging on a Drupal site.

I still have unsolved issues from last time: namely, what exactly one does with Feedburner and Technorati. Your advice would be a huge help, oh Reader!

On to the Checklist, starting where I left off:

Registries and Directories

5. Provide email subscriptions to your blog

Yes, your blog, distributed by email. It doesn't sound like a priority item, as your blog is already visible 24/7 and there's even an easy way to subscribe: RSS.

But not everyone is hep to the RSS thing, and some people do like their content delivered by email. Don't believe it? Here's one venerable info source that's polled its large readership to find out how they like their news. Take it as one data point out of infinite:

http://db.tidbits.com/article/9075

Rajesh suggests Feedblitz as a way to put your blog into email. Another service to check out!

http://www.feedblitz.com/

Looks like a for-fee newsletter service. Fine for those who want it, but what do we already have in Drupal?

The Simplenews module is the Drupal solution I've used for one site's newsletter. So we've got that. But Feedblitz (as far as I can tell) puts your blog into email for you, while Simplenews is strictly create-your-newsletter-from-scratch.

http://drupal.org/project/simplenews

There's Epublish, which looks like a tour-de-force solution for bringing together nodes into a publication, such as a newsletter.

http://drupal.org/project/epublish

But does that then tie in to Simplenews or another newsletter solution? I tried to play with Epublish in some older (4.x) installations, and was blocked by errors. I'm going to place this on the "to do" heap until I make time to experiment in 5.x. For now, the above is a pointer for anyone looking for a solution.

A question for the world at large: Do you know the Drupaliest way to cast your blog to the masses via email?

6. Link to your photo album

If you've for a Flickr album etc., make some nice links to it on your site. Not much to say about that one, and no Drupally catch.

7. Announce your blog to the world

Rajesh suggests another service, Pingomatic.

http://pingomatic.com/

But we've got the basics covered with the built-in Ping module, right?

8. Link to your online bookmarks

Similar to #6 above, if you've got a del.icio.us or similar account, link to it. It's no doubt an easier way to build and provide a link collection than creating a links page in Drupal, though an external links page takes visitors away from your site.

Or is there some nifty way to integrate a del.icio.us link collection into your Drupal site?

http://del.icio.us/

9. Validate your feeds

In other words: make sure your RSS feeds work fine. Rajesh suggests the easiest way – subscribe to your own feeds in your RSS reader – plus yet another service for the interested to check out, FeedValidator.

http://www.feedvalidator.org/

(Note to Rajesh: You need to fix your link on this one!)

I'm not aware of any special Drupal twists to this topic.

10. Geo-tag your blog

I'm clueless about geo-anything, so this is another I'll leave solely to interested parties. The recommendation:

http://www.feedmap.net/BlogMap/

On the Drupal side, a quick search of modules reveals possibly related items:

http://drupal.org/project/georss

http://drupal.org/project/google_earth (Ah, Google Earth, how many hours have your bewitching maps nipped from my life so far?)

Anyone out there have notes on what you can do with geo-stuff and a Drupal site? (Including why you'd want to do it?)

Next time

This time around, there wasn't a suggestion I'm not already using (like pings) or that looks necessary for this site. But there are 15 items left on the list; let's tackle another handful soon.