I just upgraded my Host Matters account and now have a pile more disk space, and $USD 40 less dollars (a year). Seems like a reasonably good deal to me. Now to add more blogs.
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 4:49 AM ----- BODY:I found a nasty little bug that meant that people who had created blogs through "Login" weren't actually getting scraped. Fixed, and now you are!
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 7:37 AM ----- BODY:Janes' Blogosphere This is an interesting idea, "a web-based microcontent aggregator for blogs (and soon newspapers) [that] displays all the current entries from the blogs listed in a reference blog's blogroll." What is interesting is that the concept is predicated on the fact that it takes too long to read blogs. Too long? By David Janes.
I'm here in beautiful cold St. John's with wet feet and now-working Internet connection. I'm going to spend the next few days fixing up blogs which are downloaded, but not scraped, and adding a lot of RSS-only feeds to the system.
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 5:20 AM ----- BODY:The Template Rewriter knows how to correctly rewrite Greymatter and Radio Userland templates now. A few notes:
I'll be flying off to sunny St. John's for my Winter Vacation later this morning, so I may not be answering e-mails until tomorrow morning, or until I figure out how my parent's Internet connection works.
Here's the super the new feature I've been hinting about for the last couple of days: Custom Blogrolls. Anyone with a Login can now create a "Custom Blogroll" on the website, to track the blogs that specifically interest them. This means you no longer have to use a "reference blog" to select which blogs you want to read using BlogTrack.
Use the "[+]" link from BlogTrack or "[Add]" or "[Add All]" from Search or any of the reports to add blogs to your Custom Blogroll.
I've also updated the colour scheme to make it a little more obvious what is a link and what is not, but it may be a little too Christmasy.
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 12:33 AM ----- BODY:The Blogtrack at Janes' Blogosphere
This is an excellent new resource, providing a single point where a number of entries on a number of weblogs can be reviewed and read at one time.
I corrected the possessive form my name.
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 1:14 PM ----- BODY:Another Catalog of the Blogosphere Steven Cohen has come across yet another blogosphere aggregator - Janes' Blogosphere.
The "Janes" in the title is David Janes, a Canadian blogger (eh). Naturally, David is maintaining a blog to highlight changes, endorsements, and improvements, but here's a description straight from the site:
... Offhand, I don't see a count of how many blogs are being indexed at the moment. It's an interesting twist on an online aggregator (reloading external content in a frame), plus a mix of the various ecosystems and Technorati. My favorite feature so far, though, has to be the geographical breakdown of those blogs indexed in the database (although it looks to be a subset of those currently indexed). Could dovetail nicely with political initiatives, meet ups, and business/social networks in the big "B" Blogosphere, although the obvious barrier here is the onus on bloggers to sign up and add code to their templates.
Another great find, Steven!
For the record, I believe it's around 800 blogs right now be aggregated, the list mainly drawn from:
There are a number of different strategies for putting data into the system, including a scraper than will work against 70% of blogspot sites out of the box, a regex-driven scraper, a QSM -- my markup -- scraper, and a RSS "scraper". Not ever blog in my list is parsable, but the software has an adaptive strategy to ensure it doesn't check unworking/unchanging blogs very often.
The problem with RSS blogs is that:
I plan to solve these problems by:
Right now, the real driver of the system is bandwidth, diskspace, and money, and my faith in how well the software works and scales. Once things really get rolling, I hope to be doing at least a order of magnitude more blogs. That said, I'm passively waiting for people to sign up right now, especially those with legacy/non-RSS systems, just because I am still officially "in beta". If anyone is interested in being tracked, then they can contact me or create a login.
If you like the geographical breakdown stuff -- which really is just a subset of people who have signed up + blogs where I know the location of -- I'll be introducing even cooler features based on this in thew New Year. Jenny's guess -- Could dovetail nicely with political initiatives, meet ups, and business/social networks in the big "B" Blogosphere -- is exactly where I plan to go with this.
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 4:46 AM ----- BODY:Coming soon to this very space: an explanation of what "hidden" means (in the context of BlogTrack)
Canadian weblogger David Janes has introduced a new tool which shows you, at a glance, the latest content on the weblogs in a blogroll of your choice. That's not a very good capsule explanation. You'll have to go play with the thing itself; its purpose will be obvious. You can even start with my own blogroll.
I'm ashamed to admit that Janes showed me this long-secret project months ago and I didn't understand it. I went to look at the URL he sent me (by carrier pigeon, for maximum secrecy), and whether because the thing wasn't working or my brain wasn't, its exact function wasn't clear to me. It seems like a potentially useful thing. I don't especially like that so many of the weblogs on my roll are "hidden" in the multi-frame display: why should that be? And if they're truly "hidden" shouldn't there be a way to "reveal" them? There doesn't seem to be one. But it's still a rough beta and the ingenuity is very impressive. Especially nice is that the code seems to recognize separate entries on my crude site, which is hand-built and uses no MT or CSS or XML or anything else that sounds like a model of Ford sedan. (Unless Ford is working on a car called the Notepad.)
Thanks for your patience: it's back up, thanks to the timely support of the people at Hostiing Matters. You should have probably been in bed when this all went down anyway!
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 2:42 AM ----- BODY:Hosting Matters is having problems with their MySQL database, which is required for Janes' Blogosphere to work. In the meantime, I have to add better error reporting! Hopefully, we'll be back up in a few hours.
-------- AUTHOR: David P. Janes DATE: 1:12 PM ----- BODY:BLOGTRACK: Check out BlogTrack (from David Janes), a tool for quickly skimming the contents of many blogs (the link I gave shows you a display starting with our blog, but of course you can use other blogs as the root, too). Here's the summary, by Janes himself:
Looks like a great new option, and one that illustrates the power and flexibility of the Web.
Check out the new geographical location aggregation service. Want to read all the blogs in Ontario? Here they are. Los Angeles blogs? Try this.
There's only a small subset of the total blogs we track in here so far, so please add your blog by visiting Template Rewriter and adding your geographical information!
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