Post Archive
› August 27, 2003
Fussing over blogrolls
Off and on I've been mussing about with various methods for creating a blogroll for this site, here are some notes about the matter. Today I've published a new incarnation of the blogroll, made available on a page dedicated to the matter.
What am I looking for? A blogroll can of course, just be a list of links to various weblogs you like to read. That being the case, it's a rather simple matter to setup an include that is easily edited, or simply make it part of your homepage markup. The complications come in when one wishes to make the list more of an mini-aggregator, sorting by date, or highlighting recently updated blogs. The information about when a site has been updated can be gathered via a service such as Blo.gs or blogrolling, or from a weblog's syndication feed directly. Gathering this information seems worthwhile to me, since it allows regular readers (and me) to quickly get up to speed with top notch sites. Aggregators are great, and I do use NetNewsWire Pro regularly, but there's something extra one gets when reading weblogs in their intended form, call it pseudo-meta-visual-context (e.g. - someone complains about layout of other websites, yet their own is not much better).
What have I tried? I've tried a bunch of different solutions. For a long time I used Phil's blo.gs script, which worked great but for some reason I seem to have bad luck using blo.gs and/or my lack of true php skills is tripping me up somehow (other's have used it with great success, it's well worth a try). For a short while, I tried using some MT-Plugins to do the job. I didn't have the patience for it, but Jason Bergeman of IzzyWizzy did, and he explains how to do it. I tried a number of other solutions as well, but recently, I switched gears after finding this post on Milo Vermeulen's site regarding an output script he made for the php based online aggregator feed-on-feeds, which is based off the very nicely constructed magpie rss parser. I took Milo's output script, and modified it to do what you see now on the blogroll page.
And? Well, I've put up the blogroll page partially to see how it performs as part of the site, it's neither complete in how it functions, nor polished in how it looks. Let's see how well it operates over the next few days, although it already seems very sluggish. Sluggishness almost certainly due to my haphazard modifications - perhaps if I can modify the script to publish results, rather than doing a live querry.
This nonsensical rambling has been brought to you by: The need to get past this and work on other more important things™
Comments
1. August 27, 2003 06:50 PM
2. August 27, 2003 07:57 PM
Nate Posted…
Agreed Jason - the published page idea will go on my to-do list. Also, I'll share my variation of the output template, like Milo did (once I've cleaned it up properly).
I do have to say that having feed-on-feed running makes things really quite nice, it's like having a full featured and easy to use admin tool for the application, without having to build one.
Two oddities with my current setup: since I'm not actually picking out the time of publish, I only have two settings "read" vs. "unread", my frankenscript first marks everything "read", then goes through again and looks for new stuff. The side effect of doing this is that when I add a new RSS feed, it initially wants to show all posts as "unread". Thankfully it's only a couple more clicks to get around that ("mark all read" from the feed-on-feed control panel). The other oddity - this "read" vs. "unread" technique seems to work better with a really long blogroll since it's only showing each one hour slice at a time. Of course you could see that as a benefit if you wanted to be inclusive with your blogroll anyways (like me).
Jason Posted…
Nate, you've done a pretty neat job. I like how you've organized the page, with just the most recent on top and everything else below. I'll have to implement something like that.
I was definitely inspired by your previous post on the subject and my lack of satisfaction with blogrolling.com. I kind of wish you had posted this a little sooner and I had seen Milo's post as well; I most likely would have gone that route too. I may still now that I've seen this.
I believe you would gain some speed if your scheduled update actually created the page for you, and saved it in some web directory. Your blogroll page could then just pull in that file.