Wow, can it ever be hard to do something when the tool you want to use can also be used to do something nefarious. For a long time I’ve been trying to find a WordPress plugin that will let my syndicate my blogging at Download Squad and The Unofficial Apple Weblog here onto my personal blog. I don’t care to actually syndicate the content of the posts - that’s not a fair use, but I do want to provide a link so that people that are subscribed to my blog can see that I’m not completely silent online, and can go read what I’ve been working on.

The problem is, this type of functionality is commonly referred to as “reblogging”, and it’s used by blog spammers to steal content from other blogs. Obviously not something we wish to support.

In my case, I was able to use a WordPress plugin called WP-o-Matic to accomplish what I was looking for. By default, WP-o-Matic defaults to reblogging the entire contents of the RSS feed it is reblogging from, but it was quite easy to modify the template to provide a short description of what the post was, and pull in the title of the post being reblogged (with a link back).

So now that explains why you’ll likely be seeing more of that kind of post here than of my actual writing, but at least you can now easily follow my writing online.