I’m admire John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.  His style is tight.  I’ve redesigned a few things on my own blog in an attempt to mimc a few details that make the user experience on his site special.

First, I’ve ditched the traditional notion of a title field for each post.  I’ve hacked up WordPress to link directly to whatever source I’m quoting rather than link to a single (or permalink) version of the same post on my site.  (Details below.)  I added a little hyperlinked ★ alongside the restructured title that acts as the permalink.

The other change I made was in citing sources.  Most folks simply hyperlink, others may go as far as including “Via ____” to mark that they are sharing from another source.  I attempting full on APA styled citation.

Note:  I’m lazy.  Even too lazy to visit any number of web services to create the proper styled citation.  Here’s what I’m doing.

I use Mars Edit on the Mac.  There’s a little bookmarklet that goes into my Safari Bookmark bar called “Post to Mars Edit”.  This is a typical feature included on most blog platforms and standalone blog posting packages.  Mars Edit takes things a little further.  Inside the preferences is a customizable tab for attribution.

Note below a few simple HTML pieces.  The stuff between the #’s like #body# are pieces that Mars Edit pulls directly from whatever website I’m using the “Post to Mars Edit” bookmarklet from.

Say I find a cool quote.  I simply highlight the text, click the “Post to Mars Edit” bookmarklet.  Mars Edit magically creates a new post that includes the selected quote, in blockquotes, along with the title of the post, marked up with the HTML link and italicized. This is all formatted in APA style and gets me most of the way finished.  Copy the code below.

<blockquote>#body#</blockquote>

comment

cite <a href=”#url#”"a style=”text-decoration:none”><i>#title#</i></a> [Post Image Video Comment]. Retrieved from <a href=”#url#”"a style=”text-decoration:none”>#url#</a>

#url#

The next trick involves citing the author and date of the post, quote, article, video, image, etc.  I’ve tossed together a TextExpander snippet to walk me through this part of the process.  I’ve named this snippit “/cite” all I do is type /cite and up comes a simple dialog box asking me to fill in the necessary information.  (LastName, First Initial, Year, Month, and Date).  Boom.  Copy the code below.

%fill:lastname%, %fill:firstinitial%. (%fill:year published%, %fill:month% %fill:date%).

Finally, I cut the final #url# piece in Mars Edit and use another TextExpander snippet to generate the Title field of the blog post.  I type /title and another dialog box appears asking to past the url and provide a title.  This generates a bit of HTML for the title piece that links the title directly to the source

<a href=”%fill:url%”a style=”text-decoration:none”>%fill:title%</a>

Type A?  Yeah, that’s me.