Blogroll updated
I’ve updated my blogroll so it doesn’t send horrible ?lastUpdated’s out anymore. Apart from it being a horrible hack, it was doing odd things to page refreshes, especially on Aquarion’s site.
My blogroll is powered by blo.gs and manipulated into the HTML you see on the right by a Python script written by Stuart Langridge. To make a unique link when a page was updated the URL was appended with a ?lastUpdated=<time>.
Now, I’m using mod_rewrite to forward all requests going to /blogroll/ to a Python script. The python script extracts to real URL from the fake one generated by Stuart’s script, and then forwards the request on. It seems to work fine, and I don’t think there are any problems doing it this way. For added garnish, a bit of javascript changes the status bar so you can’t see the redirect URL.
I’ve still got ideas about turning the blog roll into something actually useful as a window to the blogs I view. For sites that update very regularly (e.g. Boing Boing), a page update notification isn’t enough. I’d like to extract info about titles and entries from an RSS feed, to produce a page that says, Blog x has been updated since you last viewed it, the last title you view was XXX. Since then, titles Y and Z have been published. Also, sites sometimes fail to ping weblogs.com (or something else fails along the line), so I’d use the RSS feed to check (Hang on, Blog A hasn’t updated for three days, but the RSS feed indicates there are two new titles).
Also, you could do things like split out sites that you’d read whatever, sites that you’d check the title and extract before reading a particular entry and sites that you only what to view particular categories about. Let’s face it, with some many blogs out there, some sort of filtering is needed.
However, pipe dreams sit over the horizon and for now, this will work for me.
January 29th, 2003 at 2:29
That blogroll solution is absolutely inspired. I stopped using the query string hack ages ago for pretty much the same reasons as you - I’m very tempted to bring the feature back using your much cleaner method now.
January 29th, 2003 at 13:28
Cheers Simon, I’d not played with mod_rewrite before. I meant to say in the update that you could probably do it with regular expressions, but I’m not too clever at them.
January 31st, 2003 at 3:07
gee, you’ll accuse me of petty pedantry, but shouldn’t the title attributes be a little more informative?
January 31st, 2003 at 10:34
Do you mean adding “last updated on” to the time and date? This can be done.
January 31st, 2003 at 10:39
Do you mean adding “last updated on” to the time and date? This can be done.