The manufactured housing industry prides itself on the affordability of their homes. There certainly seem to be benefits to the factory built options, especially in rural areas where the ability to bring in contractors and do site-built homes is limited.

What the industry has not yet adequately addressed are the snake-oil methods of many dealers. Bait-and-switch and practices are all too common in the industry. Over the next few months I'll be publishing some of the documents from a recent experience we had with a deal that fell through when the dealer upped the price by 33% at the last minute. We'll also setup an area for those in the market for a new or used manufactured home to share information.

Linklogs or linkblogs give bloggers a way to share links with readers without feeling like a full post is necessary. Earlier this week there was a post over at Scripting News about the flexibility in the RSS spec to allow posts without titles. This flexibility is good as it allows for several different styles of blogging. I have shied away from one-sentence posts or shorter posts but still desire a way to let readers know about some interesting things that have crossed my path.

About a month ago I added the Recent Reads block on the left of this blog that is now called Points of Interest. The first version of the block was pretty straight forward. Using Drupal's aggregrator it is simple to point it towards the sharing feature of Google Reader. With that system in place once I came across an interesting post in my daily RSS reading I simply hit "Shift-S" and the next time the site updates the newest items are added to the recent reads block. This works great for things that come across in RSS but sometimes I would find things from emails or other sources that I wanted to include in the feed.

A couple of easy changes later Del.icio.us now feeds the Points of Interest block in addition to Google Reader. I simply setup a tag in Del.icio.us for each blog that I want a recent reads page on. This can be done in Google Reader as well. Instead of using the general "shared" feed it would be possible to hit the "t" key to tag a post and tag posts with the blog or blogs that I want the post to show up on. Maybe I'll do this later. To get the Drupal aggregrator to work as desired there are a couple of settings changes necessary. Now that the aggregrator is subscribed to both the Google Reader feed and Del.icio.us feed it is necessary to create a category, in this case called Recent Reads, which will be automatically assigned to every post in the feed.

Another great benefit is that because of Drupal's built in RSS capabilities the block is not only a point of interest on the blog page but readers can subscribe to it independently or in conjunction with the blog. Read more about Recent Reads block for Drupal

From time to time in the past I've disparaged MySpace on this blog and others. I take it all back. MySpace is awesome. Sure their security is swiss cheese and the layouts are annoying but it is possible to live forever as a teenager. It is completely possible to easily jump right back into high school. The beauty of MySpace is that all those long-forgotten high school spats and grade-school spitting contests come alive again. Teenagedom at 25, 35, 45... reality TV has nothing on this.

Steve Rubel weighs in on the value of full text feeds. He notes that a lot of Technorati Top 100 are full text feeds and that if a blog wants to grow readership full text feeds are the way to do it.