publi.sh: disposable feeds

I was fooling with the new 9Cays which I recently described as “a new tool to help manage email conversations as a collaborative space online.” One of the features of the tool is that all email threads that you create with it have an RSS feed. It occured to me that I could use 9Cays as a fast way to set up a “side blog” — a mini blog stuck in the margin of my full blog.

Here’s what I did:

1. I created a new 9Cays thread, simply by cc’ing go@9cays.com in an initial email. Note: I had already set up a 9Cays account.
   
   
2. I knew that the subject of the first message was going to become the title of the thread, so I made sure that was “Travel Plans” which is what I wanted displayed on the side blog.
   
   
3. I sent the email just to 9cays.com and myself, although I see applications where I could create a group mini blog, for example, an interview. I intend to try that next week.
   
   
4. I tried to take the RSS feed from the thread that was created and just plug it into Typepad’s feed feature, but, as in the past, the Typepad feed feature does not offer enough formatting options to make it workable.
   
   
5. Instead, I went to my Feedigest account, plugged in the RSS feed from the thread into a new Feedigest feed. I selected the “del.icio.us” style, and tweaked the template a bit, so that the RSS entries descriptions were unlimited in length, and have no URLs pointing to the 9Cays thread. Since I am using this mechanism to just create the mini blog, there is no need to have people click though to the 9Cays site.
   
   
6. I used the Typepad Typelist feature, plugging the Feedigest javascript for the new feed into my Calendar Typelist. You can see it in the right margin, immediately above the Eventful Calendar I post for my travel schedule.
   
   
7. I haven’t done it, but because of the RSS feeds, I could publish the feed for a mini blog of this sort, independent of the /Message RSS feed.
   
   
8. I haven’t checked to see what happens with embedded HTML in this series of gaskets, but I have configured the Feedigest RSS template to allow HTML through. More to follow.
   
   

So, now, whenever I want to make some commentary about upcoming or recent travel, all I have to do is to send an email to the thread that has been created at 9Cays. I incidentally got conversation-666@9cays.com which appeals to the hidden satanist in me. [Years ago, I was being taken to my room by a bellman who was wheeling a bunch of conference gear on a luggage cart. When we entered the elevator he looked at the key, started, and said, “You have room 666.” I turned and said, “I always request that room,” which made him actually shiver.]

There are some downsides: 9Cays does not — at the moment — allow for editing, deleting, or reordering the messages being stored in the thread, so I have to really be careful before hitting send. But the ease of creating side blogs or mini blogs like this, and embedding them into an existing full-featured blog is a very attractive alternative to creating additional blogs in Typepad, for example.