One of the features I’d really like to have in Known, is the ability to schedule posts for a later date.

Sometimes I do this via my post by email plugin combined with an email scheduling tool, and at some point I’ll actually get around to sending a pull request to schedule posts natively.

In the meantime, I wrote a quick plugin which makes use of the Buffer service to create a post schedule for your a number of social networking accounts.

When installed and configured, this plugin will give you a new “buffer” syndication channel which will act like a meta channel – posting to multiple social networking accounts configured according to your buffer schedule.

Hope this is useful to some of you!

» Visit the project on Github...

Known supports syndication to a number of silos (twitter, facebook etc), but since I also have some contacts on LinkedIn, I thought it would be handy to syndicate to them as well. So, I wrote a quick plugin to do just that…

Once installed and activated, you will need to get a LinkedIn application ID and secret key from the developer site (instructions in the plugin’s admin page). After you have entered these in the admin panel, users will have the option of authenticating their account and syndicating posts to LinkedIn.

The plugin currently supports status updates (although, in a rather limited way owing to LinkedIn’s API), article posts and images.

Give it a try!

» Visit the project on Github...

This article got me pondering on how one might start building a distributed “related article” network, but without relying on a centralised silo.

Related articles on the same site is largely a solved problem, but at the moment, to do the similar thing with multiple sites requires a centralised service. Centralisation is bad, as we’ve discussed before, so how could you build a federated network of sites, all referring people between each other in an automated but meaningful way?

My current thinking is to leverage PuSH; Alice lists sites to which they’d like to receive related articles from, these could be individual sites or even a centralised aggregator. Alice’s site then subscribes to the PuSH hub and starts receiving updates, when these updates are received they can be passed through to whatever comparison algorithm you’re using – I’m thinking of adapting the wordpress one for this blog.

Should be fairly straightforward to implement, and would provide a simple way to federate content within a group of individuals.

Anyone working on something like this, or shall I drop this into my todo list?