Yesterday, I wrote:
I'll try to find the time to create topic-oriented views for stuff I write about more than just sporadically. I'm afraid Typepad doesn't make this particularly easy, but it seems doable. If you want me to add a new category, just say so. For the time being, I'm planning at least a spam and an open source category.
Upon closer examination, it appears that I'd need to upgrade my account to "Pro", which is almost $90 a year (versus the $50 I hesitate to plonk down for the very basic-level account) so I won't do this at least yet.
That sucks. Why doesn't the default category page have an RSS feed which is confined to just that category? This seems like a no-brainer to me.
Alternatives at this point:
- Abandon TypePad and find a blogging platform which supports this out of the box. I'm afraid I don't have the time to spend on researching this and migrating the blog over, so I guess this is mostly a theoretical possibility at this point. Maybe later, like, next year? Unless of course I find other problems with TypePad during the free two-week trial.
- Hack my own little feed processor and use that. I really hate the idea, but it shouldn't be too hard. Maybe someone else has already done this. (But then maybe that someone is likely to have used PHP, which is a non-starter for me.)
- Monetize my web presence in order to attempt to recover at least part of the costs. I don't think this blog will pull in a lot of AdSense moolah but perhaps e.g. my Procmail FAQ could. I've been thinking about that for some time already. The (for now, planning-stage) on-line T-shirt shop is part of that grander plan, too. But again, do I have the time for all these diversions?
On another topic, this is one of those times when adding a trackback to a previous post of my own would be good for cohesion ... but I'll just put a comment to the previous post with a pointer to this one, I guess.
(Hmm. Automating that with a mash-up would be extremely nice. Is this possible at all with TypePad?)
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