Use mini blogs to enhance your blog and your single articles!
The idea of using asides is not new but still something most bloggers don't think about. Why? Simply because most bloggers are article oriented. Beside publishing the 'big' content you should always have an eye on enhancing your content.
One of the easiest ways to cover small aside content on your blog is to find a way to publish the small snippets in your template automatically at an appropriate place. If you use the grid concept or simply little divs floating at the right place doesn't matter.
How to create a mini blog for your site
How to get those snippets? I find it very easy and useful to write mini blogs by using good and short notes for my del.icio.us bookmarks and/or good descriptions on Flickr.
If you use the (tag) feed output of those sites you can have a nice publishing form on your blog. If the produced content is directly in your code and not generated by some JavaScript widget you will gain additional search engine love too!
My workflow for a mini blog
Very often I do a research on a certain subject and during that research publish a lot of useful mini-blog content by bookmarking found pages on del.icio.us. Tag those bookmarks appropriately and you have a great enhancement for your blog.
On my local news site in Hamburg Sankt-Georg.Info you will find the latest ten of my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged 'Hamburg' in the sidebar (which is only on that homepage not in the single article template).
The same technique is reproducable for every single article. You just have to tag your mini blog content right.
I am using the SimplePie plugin for Textpattern to fetch the RSS feeds and publish them directly in my code (Links to d.i.u. feed outputs).
It is up to your imagination what you can do with those mini blogs...
