Earth: Mostly Harmless

Truncated posts

Truncated..

Ahem.

I realised last night that the hellish import procedure I went through to get my posts out of the old Blogsome site was to some extent in vain.

It turns out that the XSL stylesheet I used to turn the Blogsome Atom feed into RSS 2.0 chose the summary field and not the description field for each item to use as the RSS description.

The practical results of which is that all of my imported posts were truncated to about 300 characters, and links and images were stripped out.

I’m going through all of them gradually putting the needful back in.

Arr.

WP-Cache

I’ve just installed WP-Cache to speed up this site and reduce loading times. I had to customise it to fix a blank-page bug so if you have any problems please contact me (a contact page is coming soon!)

On a related note, there will now only be 5 items on the front page (another loading time measure). Also, you’ll now be able to get 20 items through the RSS feed instead of the previous 10.

Clicky clicky!

Note: This was originally posted on an older revision of this blog hosted somewhere else, so it doesn’t make sense in its current context. Just here for completeness.

This weblog is now enabled for Safari-powered blue squidgy address bar RSS button goodness!

Deconstructing the ‘blogosphere’, one post at a time

As I was saying in the previous post, blogs are starting to irritate me a little. It’s not that I don’t find them useful, it’s just that I think we need a better way to aggregate things together, and sort out the wheat from the chaff. What’s missing currently (in software aggregators and in web service aggregators) is a way to dynamically aggregate communities together, and also posts on the same topic - i.e. clustering technology. This sort of thing eliminates some of the high ‘barriers to entry’ (sorry, economics, I know) that accompanies the use of RSS feeds and blogs. Put simply, apart from a few consistently high-quality sites, you currently have to negotiate through quite a few pages of crap blogs before you find what you’re looking for. Some of this, I realise, adds to the spontaneity and dynamism of blogs, but it can be tiresome for new users.

As part of my job I have been looking into some of these ideas for possible use for student/faculty communication. The current choice is between an extended blog environment, a large set of Wikis and/or a large and (apparently) clever email system including group-ware functions. Although I don’t have the technical skills to implement much of it, a sort of hybrid Wiki and blog server, with some sort of automatic clustering/editorial technology to generate a digest of posts and discrete topics, is something that I find a really nice idea. Maybe something like Google News, but for individual communities or rough topic areas, and the blog elements added on. It would give some level of editorial control, like a multi-user blog, but would be as extensible and powerful as a Wiki, and with automatic ‘landing page’ generation for each search/topic/department.

If anyone knows of something like this which already exists please contact me.