Posts tagged: SITE

I’ve recently moved the Wellblogs aggregator to my server from its former home. It’s a simple “planet” style presentation that shows the last week’s worth of posts across a few dozen blogs written by members of The Well.

The software is a Python engine written by Michael Josephson, and I’ve been very impressed with it so far. It’s based on Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser, a MySQL data store, Cheetah templates, and some extra bits to gracefully handle the inevitable connection failures involved when fetching dozens of disparate feeds every hour. Getting everything working was a breeze, and as someone doing more web development in Python lately I’m finding the code interesting reading. Hopefully the blogs are too!

I’ve rearranged a few things in the page template and added a couple features:

• Comments from me are now colored differently so they can be more easily identified (until recently I never had enough comments to need this!)
• A random set of seven of my Delicious bookmarks appear in the sidebar
• “Recent comments” links now go directly to the individual comment

In the queue: comment preview, delicious/reddit/digg bookmarking links. How many more tweaks will I do before migrating away from PHP5? I really should do it while I still have a chance of cleaning up and releasing the code.

Just made some minor improvements to the RSS infrastructure here on the site:

1. There are now feeds that allow you to follow comments on an individual post (look for the “comment feed” button).

2. I created a minimal stylesheet so that feed-reader-less users will see something a little prettier and more informative in their browser if they attempt to view a feed directly. There’s much more I could do here (with XSL for instance), but it’s a start. This actually was the first time I’d ever written a stylesheet for XML content.

I’ve wanted to add this for a while: Now, individual post pages have a box below the post listing others that relate to it, based on tags. The sort order is based on the number of matching tags (more is better) then on the posting date (newer is better). Feedback on this feature is welcome.

I have a weak spot for the “Cool URIs don’t change” philosophy. Most of my personal web projects from the ’90s are still online. Some of them have been unchanged for ten years. My very first multi-page site, which I called “Ersatz Info-Rama”, is still up. I last updated it on December 31, 1995.

There are some classic links in there – the first tutorial on animated GIFs; the “scary” new search engine, altavista.digital.com; even some gopher resources.