Beefing up community feeds

If you weren't paying attention, you may have missed the latest news in Planet MySQL. A few months ago, the site has added the ability of voting for posts (in addition to searching and tagging, which make it much more useful than it was before). However, if you, like many, read Planet MySQL using a feed reader, the recent benefits are not easily usable. To allow everyone to vote on the posts they like, even from a feed reader, the feeds now include two links at the end of for each post, to vote on a deserving post even from a feed reader.

The feed may look like this one:

Since I liked this post, I can click on Vote UP, and the link opens in my default browser, showing the result of the voting.

The same happens for the MySQL Librarian feed. At the end of each post, you can click on vote UP or vote DOWN directly from your feed reader.
In both cases, the vote works only if you are already logged in. If you aren't, you will be taken to the login page.
This is not the end of the story. More goodies will come. Stay tuned.

Automating MySQL Librarian tasks

The MySQL Librarian is a collection of community generated content, easy to search and to extend. If you have missed the announcement, you may look at Introducing the MySQL Librarian.. To add a new link, you have several ways. You can just use the Add A Link feature inside the Librarian. If the link to be added comes from Planet MySQL, every post has a link to facilitate the insertion to the Librarian. For everything else, adding a link is a manual task. Until today.

Adding easily to the Librarian

Diego Medina, who should be well known in the community as a very active promoter of MySQL Proxy, and one of the most creative bug finders, has made two additions that have already been incorporated into the Librarian. If you go to the MySQL Librarian now, you will find a "bookmarklet" that you can drag and drop to your browser toolbar (if your browser is either FireFox or Safari, that is). After that, you have a button in your toolbar, which you can use to quickly add a new link.

For example, let's consider an article that we may want to add to the Librarian. Something like MockLoad on Launchpad - MySQL Proxy.

If you have already dragged and dropped the bookmarklet, you can click on your new button, and get to the Librarian page, with almost all the detailed already filled in for you.

Search engines

Diego didn't limit his contribution to adding links. He has also created a new search engine plugin for FireFox, which lets you use the MySQ Librarian as your search engine.

Adding the Librarian engine	Using the Librarian engine

If your default search engine is the Librarian, your search will be sent to MySQL Librarian, as easily as you search in Google or in any other engine.

Thanks, Diego!