Posts in Weblog Applications
I am now generating RSS feeds for each category.
I've been almost completely out of the loop on weblogs, RSS, syndication, etc. for the past few weeks, so I am just now starting to digest
Necho.
My first pass at having my weblog app generate an Necho file is
here.
For those of you with weblogs of your own, I am sure you are already well familiar with
BlogShares, so I won't spend any time explaining it here. If you aren't familiar with it, click the link and check it out.
What I really want to tell you about is that my
weblog is finally trading on BlogShares.
[Listening to: Dead Man Blues - Jelly Roll Morton - The Best Of Ken Burns Jazz (03:15)]
Well, I've nearly implemented all of the functionality needed for me to use
w.bloggar with my weblog app. Honestly, implementing these XML-RPC API's is such a pain in my ass. It just seems so backwards compared to building web services in .NET.
Oh well, what's done is done.
Back in the early days of my weblog app, I came across
Charles Cook's excellent
XML-RPC.NET library and used it to ping
weblogs.com whenever there was a new post.
Now, I think I will delve into it once again -- this time to implement the MetaWeblogAPI and the BloggerAPI.
This is so cool. Sit back and watch the world blog its way around the clock. Now you know you simply must get those geotags and that RSS autodiscovery machinery into your blog.
[Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon]
Indeed, this is one of the coolest things I've seen lately.
I mentioned
earlier that I was going to start on this this past weekend, but better late than never. Anyway, I've begun to play around with implementing search functionality for the weblog. At the moment it is a very basic search that matches everything entered, and only the body of an entry is searched.
You can see it for yourself over at what is becoming the
testing ground for this site.
Of course I've got a few things to work out still, but the search functionality should find it's way into production shortly.
Does anyone implement search on their blogs? The .NET
weblog
systems I have seen don't, neither
does Radio. But Sam Ruby's does.
I would think that search would be a useful feature. Is it? If not, why not?
[Harry Pierson's DevHawk Weblog]
I think that I will finally stop putting off adding this
feature.
Previously, I discussed
using the
ASP.NET Calendar Control as an additional means of navigating my archives.
Since then, there has been a
lot of talk about what is the best (or preferred) method for presenting archives and navigating them, and it seems that most people don't care for the calendar method (at least not as the only method).
Personally, I do like the Calendar method for navigating, as long as it isn't the only method. I especially like the ability to select a range of dates using the ASP.NET Calendar Control -- such as everything for a month, week, or day, so you aren't forced to click each individual day to view posts.
Anyway, I've always provided the ability to navigate archives by month using the simple Archives list you see on this page. I even show the number of posts for a given month. Prior to right now, clicking a link in the Archive list would display all the posts, in their entirety for that month. Now, I list only the titles of each post and provide a link to each individual post, as
others have done.
I am not sure which presentation method I prefer. When you click an Archive link for a specific month, do you want to have all the posts right there in front of you, or do you prefer just to see their titles, and perhaps even a summary?
What is the best way to implement referrer tracking in a home-grown weblog?
[Harry Pierson's DevHawk Weblog]
My
referrer page currently treats each unique URL as just that -- unique. So this -
http://objective.mine.nu/archive/2003/1/2.aspx - is different than this -
http://objective.mine.nu/. I decided to do this mainly because I was interested in the specific location that was referring someone to my site, not just the referring site. However, if you look at my referrer's page, you'll see that only the domain is displayed, and not the path info (moving your mouse over the links reveals the true referring URL).
This was pretty quick and dirty, well not dirty, but quick. Anyway, I've been thinking of other ways to display the referrer information, and keep coming back to a hierarchical view, where I display the referring domains, and then drill down to view data on the specific referring URL's.
Of course, I am always looking for a better way...
I need to make the content of my weblog, or any weblog powered by my weblog app searchable.
Thanks to Brad Wilson, I just RSS subscribed to a new blog. Bryan Daneman appears to be working on a .NET-powered weblog app and with my Radio license due to expire in a month or two, perhaps it's time to start looking. My favorite feature in Radio is the integrated news aggregator and as soon as Bryan gets this implemented, I may have to start begging him for a copy. [
Grumpicus Maximus]
I had forgotten about adding this feature. I will work on it in the morning.
Chris wants to know about my trackback implementation so that our sites can talk in a more automagic way.
I am on the cusp of redoing the trackback functionality for the
weblog app. Until then, you can click the Trackback link below each post to get the URL that a trackback can be sent to. I have verified that sending a trackback from Movable Type to my trackback page works. If you have no way of sending a trackback through your weblog app, then you can put everything in the querystring, or you can use the test form that the web service page provides. Go
here for more information doing this.
More to come...eventually...
I've finally gotten around to implementing a
referrer log for my little
weblog app. Like most other things in the weblog app, it is usable for me, but probably still lacking if others were to use it.
I decided to create an
HTTPModule to intercept incoming requests and log the referrer information. Currently, it ignores requests made from the site it is implemented in. This will probably change and become an configurable option, I just didn't care to see referrers to my site, from my site -- but others might.
One other "to do" is to create a server control for easily displaying the list of referrers.
There is another user of my .NET based weblog application. Welcome to the neighborhood,
Ken!
This brings the total number of weblogs powered by my app up to 6 including mine and
metaApps.com.
Here's how the story goes...
I downloaded Radio.Userland. Why? I don't know, I wanted to see what it does and how it works. Anyway, I was checking out their News page and realized that I could easily make content from metaBlogs available as a news feed as well. 15 minutes later, it was done.
With relative ease, I was able to migrate 2 years worth of content from Blogger to my new system, metaBlog.
The metaBlog system itself is still a bit rough around the edges, for example, I don't have the archive functionality built yet. Also, the comments feature doesn't work. I had multiple users setup to post to my Bloger blog, I still need to set those users up in my metaBlog blog and point their posts to the right user ID.
Finally, you might notice the new design of the site. It might stay, or not. I am undecided.
The weblog system that I've been building is almost ready for it's coming out party.
Of course it is not 100% ready yet, but it is ready enough to begin using. The first task will be migrating this site to it. BTW, the system is tenatively named metaBlog. You can learn more about it at
metaApps.com.
I am building my own blogging system. I've been building it for a while. It is mainly for myself and my friends and family to use, but once complete, I will make the code available. There is no website for it at the moment.
Another project.
I am experimenting with
Movable Type is
this bad?
This is pretty cool...
Anyway,
this is a cool thing...and this post, as well as the previous one, is posted using it.
um, ok...so that previous post, well it was just posted using the
blogger.newPost API.
So what, you say? Well the Blogger API pretty much falls in line with the stuff I've been doing over at metaStash.com, that is, Web Services.
To follow up on the 'so what' theme, this means that blogging can be done from your own application, be it on the desktop or a website. Me, I am posting this from my own web page.