Borrowing elements of Daring Fireball

One of the things I like about Daring Fireball is that the permalink for posts in the RSS feed go directly to the item being discussed rather than the post itself. This is actually a common convention these days, as seen on kottke.org, Shawn Blanc and Waxy, among others. Tumblr is built almost exclusively around that concept of sharing and curating links to other places.

In an effort to make this blog more like the blogs enjoy, I've fixed my Liquid templates to adapt to this convention. Posts that don't link to or discuss specific articles elsewhere will look as they always have; the ones that do will now link the title to the item in question while providing a permalink to the post via ☺ (unicode smiley) in the upper-right-hand corner. For the RSS feed, the approach is inverted, with long-form, original posts being prefaced with ☺ and the rest appearing normally.

Finally, in concluding this state of the blog address, I've come up with semi-satisfactory solutions for handling search and 404 pages. One of the challenges in writing a blog built entirely on Amazon S3 and Jekyll is finding clever ways to emulate the kind of dynamic functionality you typically see on the server-side. Page redirections and database searches are much simpler in that environment. To get the same effect on the blog I had to resort to a lot of smoke and mirrors, much of which I look forward to writing about in future posts.

UPDATE: I also decided to split up the feeds so you have the option of subscribing to all of the posts, just the links or just the full-length, original postings.