Quick-Links is a way for me (and a few others) to post links to random stuff without the hassle of writing an entire post about them. The longer I've had this weblog, the more it seems to have migrated towards really long posts, at the expense of quick off-the-cuff links. Thanks to Mark Paschal's excellent instructions and a bit of Ruby hacking, I can redress that balance.
The only theme for these links is that they are things that the contributors happened to find interesting enough to point to. As such, and given that they're not going to hold any original content, I'm not going to tempt anyone's wrath by syndicating them on Javablogs :)
Quick-Links has its own RSS 2.0 feed, and is also syndicated on livejournal.
carlfish is me, Charles Miller. Don't ask how the nickname came about.
lonita is Lonita Fraser, a good friend I've known from IRC pretty much forever, and on whom I am counting to lower the total-nerd quotient of the links.
alang is Alan Green, a cow-orker who sincerely wishes more people would code in Python.
Ooh, what's the Ruby part?
The MT UI is a little too heavyweight for just writing two lines of text, so I threw together a quick-and-dirty CGI script that posts over XML-RPC instead.
Nifty. That way you can also label them "Link" and "Description" instead of "Entry" and "Excerpt" or title or whichever you used.
I co-opted the Excerpt so that it would just hold the URL of the item being linked to. That way I could do <link><$MTEntryExcerpt$></link> in the RSS feed.
So yeah, it's useful to be able to rename stuff on the form for the people I might ask to contribute who aren't MT users themselves.