Three Tools To Help Create Roundup Posts
March 17, 2009 by Jason
One of the more time consuming posts for bloggers is the roundup post. A collection of link favorites seems easy enough to the untrained eye, but until you sit down to actually create a few of these posts you cannot appreciate the work involved.
First, the links must be identified and flagged in some way that you can refer back to later when creating the roundup post. Then bloggers must create the actual post, which could simply contain all the links titles dropped into a post, or some additional editorial comments from the blogger on each article’s subject.
I usually do a little of both – some links don’t need further discussion, and other times I like to put my personal spin on the topic. Depending on the number of links you choose to include these roundups have the potential to take a while to draft. Here are a few tools to use to cut down on the time spent creating future roundups.
Alltop.com
AllTop.com recently made my life a little easier by creating a MyAlltop feature which allows members to select from AllTop’s list of feeds to create a personal AllTop page. I’ve been sorting through the list of feeds to select a few of my favorites, and these will serve as the foundation of most of my roundup posts.
Alltop lists the most recent five posts from each blogger, which is helpful if I am behind on my feed reader (as I usually am). If I don’t have any links currently identified I scan the list of posts from my favorites and read those that appear interesting to me, or on theme with my current roundup.
StumbleUpon
Throughout the week as a I work through my feed reader, or follow links from those who comment at my blogs, I like to stumble those that are worthy of linking to in my next roundup post. To go a step further, I leave a few notes on the article when submitting to StumbleUpon that will be the basis for my editorial comments on the post when I draft the roundup.
Each week, when it is time to write the roundup post, I simply go to my StumbleUpon “favorites” page, grab the link to the article and copy and paste my comments into the editor. Most of the time I add a little to the comments to expand on my review of the post.
Notepad (Text Editor)
If all else fails I revert back to my handy text editor – in my case, usually just the simple notepad function on my computer. At the beginning of the week I create a file called Roundup-date.txt where date is the day the roundup is scheduled to run. When browsing articles and reading emails throughout the week I copy and paste the URL of those articles that are potential candidates for the roundup post.
You can accomplish the same thing by creating a draft post in WordPress, but this method has some drawbacks. Obviously, if you don’t have online access you can’t modify or add to your list of links. This may not be a big deal when adding links, but you may be offline when the time comes to set up the post, and without anything stored locally you won’t have much to work with. I prefer to use tools like Alltop and StumbleUpon throughout the week and then move favorites into text format a couple days before my roundup post is due.
Do you have any additional tips for making roundup posts easier to put together?
Photo courtesy of ianmunroe
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What I do is simply add a “roundup” tag to each roundup-worthy post as I read it in Google Reader. Then when I go to create the post, I can just view all my “roundup” tags for the week.
So very true… I once thought round-ups would be a breeze… no thought and a few cut and pastes… wow was I wrong. It can be a royal pain.
I’ve only released 1 round-up so far and I’m drafting my next one so I don’t know if I have it mastered, but here’s how I approach it.
I create a template for my round-up post. This forces me to limit the chatter and focus on the links. I then create the post as a draft and paste in my template. Then I simply open this draft post everytime I open my reader. If I see something I like I typically comment back to the author and if I really liked it I’ll create a link immediately into my draft round-up.
Following this method I’m sure to add links that inspired me in the moment of discover so all commentary I add is fresh in that context. I also only have to visit these links or posts once.
I do run the risk of linking to a single blog multiple times but I should be able to avoid ‘force-fitting’ posts just because there’s a deadline looming… besides if someone if dropping killer content all the time I want to help promote it.
At this time, I’m only doing monthly round-ups so we’ll see how this works, but the process seems sound.
Thanks for this great topic and I welcome all improvement ideas on my process too.
Thanks!
Dave
I don’t do roundup posts because they are so time consuming…and I think most of my readers follow lots of other blogs anyways. But, I follow Simple Mom (simplemom.net) and have noticed that she used Tumblr. Anyone tried that?
I’ve only done two and the actual posting is the lightest work I do all week. But, I usually have to go from memory. I remember there were a couple stories I wanted to highlight and then at the end of the week I go searching. It could only be in my feed reader or on Mixx or something, but it is rather time consuming. Plus I am usually in two locations during the week, so if I wanted to flag something I’d have to be able to send it to myself through email or flag it online somewhere where I log in.
@ObliviousInvestor – how do you flag stuff on google reader? I’ve looked around for a way to flag stuff and haven’t found it. That would make my life easier.
@Su Prieta – At the bottom of every post in Google Reader, there are a bunch of options “Add star, share, share with note” etc. The very last one is “edit tags.” Click on that, and just type in “roundup.”
Then when you go to prepare your roundup post, you can just click the “roundup” tag, and it’ll show you all of your posts. As I write the roundup post, I remove the tag from each post that I include. Once I have nothing tagged for roundup anymore, I know I’m finished.
@ObliviousInvestor – Thanks. I’ll give it a try.
I am working with Wordpress and I can’t figure out how to paste a url in a roundup post….I’m technologically challenged. Any advice is appreciated.
@ Ken – I’m new to this and technically challanged as well, but I’ll offer how I post links… If there’s a better way I’ll be looking for that commentary as well!
I’m using 2.7 so your details may vary…
– prepare you post as normal in the Edit Post Window
– at the top right of this window, I toggle from Visual to HTML
– I learned that if I use the Paste from Word function my HTML is much cleaner
– In a seperate window, open the page you want to link – if a post get the post page not the front page where the post happens to be today – copy this link
– Back in your Edit Page, HTML version… I have “Link” button in my tool bar – clink this
– this opens a window into which you can post your link, then click OK
- the html link code wil paste into your HTML view – click over to Visual to see how it’ll appear… I’ll then save and open a preview so I can test the link
I hope this helps!
Dave
I have two main ways to keep track of articles: 1) I use Google Reader for RSS and I STAR any article I like that I might want to go back and include in a round-up. It also has a great search feature if I ever want to look for a specific term in an article. 2) Evernote. I used to use Google Notebooks but since development ended on it I switched to Evernote. There are different ways you can clip a url to save it. You can even take clips of a site (I haven’t played with that yet though). What’s real nice about EN is you can access it on your desktop, online, or on your phone.