Linklogs and Wordpress
So the cool thing to do if you’re a wordpress user these days (and i read more and more people are switching) is to set-up a linklog, something along the lines of kottkes remaindered links or anil dashs daily links. It’s just that there’s no built-in mechanism in wordpress for handling those linklogs. Sure, there’s the link manager, but that one’s actually meant to handle your blogroll, certainly not archived links of temporary importance (believe me on this one, i tried it and things got ugly pretty fast).
The way this is usually done in movable type is with multiple weblogs, but since wordpress only supports one weblog per install (though more than one in a single database after multiple installs) this isn’t too recommendable. I personally tried four different approaches since i started my linklog back in nov’03, first a custom system for my custom blogging tool, then the wordpress link manager, then a custom system for wordpress hacked together in a day, now separately styled regular weblog entries in a special category among regular posts in my database. Something like this appears to be the current solution de jour as it’s pretty close to matt mullenwegs “asides” linklog, a technique also discussed here. Because his implementation looks a lot cleaner than mine and because in_category() will find its way into wordpress 1.2 i don’t bother to provide any further details about how i’ve done it, trust me, you’re in far better hands with matts than mine.
The other popular solution these days appears to be plug-ins for linklog management. I’ve tried this before as well and wasn’t completely satisfied, but that’s perhaps because my ugly hack sucked. In the end i abandoned the idea because i wanted my whole weblog data to be part of the wordpress system. Treating your links as first class citizens among your other posts is imho the best way to avoid lock in and remain compatible with future upgrades. If you don’t see a problem in this or the “asides”-hack doesn’t fit your needs, i can point you to two different link manager plug-ins. I haven’t tried any of them so i can’t comment on their quality: the first one is wp-recent-links by markku seguerra (announced here), the second is the recently released wplinkblogger by adam gessaman. Afaik both rely on additional tables, so your links will effectively reside outside your core wordpress data.
In the long run it’s imho necessary for wordpress to address these apparent needs of the community, but as long as a simple template hack gets the job done as well that’s not too urgent.