Potential index posts?

[the_rck]

I’ve been thinking that it would be useful to have a central post (possibly a sticky post?) for people to leave comments with links that aren’t immediate action things or that go to somewhere that has a lot of different things going on or to somewhere that features information that will be useful long term. Someone would then compiled submitted links, sorting them by type (more on that below).

My assumption is that keeping up with submitted links wouldn’t take a lot of time at any one time, so I’m willing to undertake the task. If it gets to be too much, I’ll ask for help, but this is the sort of thing that I know I can do.

Would such a post work better as a sticky or as a weekly linkspam? Or, heaven help me, both?

Right now, I’m thinking of the following categories, but others might come up, and some might need to be collapsed together. I have no idea if this categorization scheme would make sense to anyone but me, so please let me know what you think.


Sibling communities. Right now, I only have thisfinecrew, but I haven’t looked anywhere but on my reading list, so I wouldn’t see most such things.

Linkspam posts/blogs that frequently post political linkspams or linkspams that include political links among other stuff. A good example of the former is this post at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: http://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2016/11/getting-involved/ That’s not a site that does political stuff often, so linking to the whole site wouldn’t make sense. Example of the latter are umadoshi or conuly

Individual blogs that often have political content and/or suggestions for action. I’m thinking of folks like twistedchick here.

Useful articles/sites. Things like sites offering phone scripts and the .gov sites for looking up contact information for elected officials and like http://www.volunteermatch.org/

Inspirational posts/posts talking about long term actions. Some of these will be the sort of thing that might cheer one up, and some won’t, so I’d like a better label than inspirational. I’d like something that could encompass this angry but determined tumblr post: http://heavenscalyx.tumblr.com/post/153223785731/last-wednesday-we-woke-up-to-a-nightmare-one-of and recent somewhat grim posts at Stonekettle Station: http://www.stonekettle.com/ and this more directly inspirational LJ post: http://mrissa.livejournal.com/982054.html

Fun/cute/relaxing stuff for when it’s all too overwhelming. I don’t have much here, but I suspect that we could come up with something more than just zooborns.com

Satire. Because, sometimes, you have to laugh in order not to cry. Mostly, what I’ve got there is The Daily Show and the shows of various Daily Show alumni. Has anyone compiled all of the Biden meme stuff?


I’m not sure what order to put these in or what order to put the links in within each category. Alphabetical is generally easy, but may not be the most helpful. I think a cut tag for each category might help. What do you think? Would it make sense to sort by type within each category? To sort by date added?

How much information is needed for each link? Generally speaking, that’s the part that’s likely to take the most time/work for the compiler, but I think it’s pretty crucial. I definitely don’t want anyone clicking on a link that’s angry/depressing without knowing that that’s what it will be, and each link needs enough so that people scanning the list can find what they’re looking for even if they don’t know the site name/author.

I thought about trying to mine linkspams in addition to linking them, but I can’t promise that I’d reliably have the time/energy to do that. If anybody else wants to take that on, I think it could be helpful.

I’m now also thinking that a sticky post index to some or all posts in the community might also be useful, but tags will cover that to some extent, so is that something we might need/want? If we do, would it be for all posts or just for some? I think it would be most useful for things that don’t have expiration dates. If we do want it, is anyone up to taking on the job?

Comments

[jenett]

I am collecting links relevant to my particular interests (which include general useful stuff, things for bad days, but also specifically materials of interest to librarians and Pagans) on Pinboard at https://pinboard.in/u:seekknowledge

I'm glad for people to mine things there, or make use of it, but I have insufficient spoons to linkwrangle here directly on a reliable basis for other categories.

A couple of things I've been thinking about re: links:

- a bunch of links will be immediately timely, but then not relevant after a week or two (current info about a thing to call about, for example, that may stop being the relevant thing)

- some general resources will probably be updated for a bit, and then not updated (because life happens) Link checking is important on a stuck post, but timeconsuming and annoying to do manually on DW (on some platforms, like WordPress, you can automate a ton of it.)

- duplication of links or content may get overwhelming to manage (which isn't to say it isn't worth pulling stuff together, but limiting which things go in a pinned post might make it more manageable?)

[randomling]

I think this is a great idea and I really like your categories.

I think some of these would work better in a sticky and some would work in a linkspam, but I don't think you have to do this all by yourself if we can find other people who would be up for helping.

It occurs to me that the funny stuff/cute animals/satire might be good under a sort of "self-care help" sort of tag? Then it'd be fairly easy to click on the tag and surf for stuff to help you feel better.

An index does sound like a good idea - we could definitely add some links to the Welcome post. (I think we're limited to two stickies on a free account, but I'll check that.) Or we could make the index a sticky and link to the posting template from that...

[the_rck]

The posting template isn't that large, so putting it in the same post with a community index would probably work, too.

I agree with you that some of this stuff will probably be better as linkspam posts and some stuff better as part of a permanent index post. If we've got a decent index post, we don't really need to make the permanent link index post a sticky.

My suspicion, based on working on metanews, is that the thing that would be really exhausting and stressful about linkspam posts would be trying to seek out links. There are a lot of places that will have a post or two that are useful, and looking for them is the sort of thing that will expand to fill as much time as is available. I'm willing to grab things that come my way anyway, but I don't want to go through 90 blogs every week to see what fits. I'm also pretty Tumblr ignorant, so I can't find stuff there (and it's a huge rabbit hole in terms of devouring time).

My hope is not to spend more than about ten hours a week on this.

[illariy]

I really like this idea. Also thank you for the links to umadoshi and twistedchick.