User Comments

Whew! I’m glad you did this first. Now there’s a little something to follow…

That’s cool Mike. It’s good to feel that I am contributing something useful.

Drop me a line if you need any further details (http://urbanmainframe.com/contact_us.asp, or post comments here).

Hmm… Had I known you were looking to do this, I’d have been happy to share my little PHP script with you. :) It simply grabs my favorites.rss file, does a bit of parsing, and spits out the XHTML. Since blo.gs states that you shouldn’t grab the files more than once an hour, my blogroll only updates on the hour. If blo.gs ever get’s their cloud interface set up to only pass me the blogs that I care about when it is pinged, I’ll be able to have it update in real-time, but it’d probably be too much of a waste of bandwidth to register a cloud and monitor all blogs simply to update my blogroll in real time.

Perhaps if I get the time I’ll touch up the script I use to make it a bit more user friendly to set up, and then make it available…

“I’d have been happy to share my little PHP script with you.”

Now you tell me! :-(

Seriously though, I was happy to do it. I prefer to have it in Perl integrated into my CMS.

Mine updates pseudo-hourly: All page requests made within 1-hour of the last blo.gs request are served from the cache. If the cached blogroll is older than an hour, then a new request is made to blo.gs and the roll regenerated.

The difference then, is that mine doesn’t make a request to blo.gs unless there is a user request to fulfill. With my lowly traffic rates this equates to one request every three weeks! ;-)

“cloud interface” - what the heck is that?

You used Perl for your CMS rather than PHP? Too bad. :p

Not sure if the term “cloud interface” really means much apart from it being the term coined for passing the pings along to other services. Take a look at http://blo.gs/cloud.php for more information.

“You used Perl for your CMS rather than PHP?”

I did indeed. There were several reasons why:

1. I am very familiar with Perl and C, having been programming in both for 6 years.
2. Apache + mod_perl (http://perl.apache.org/) means that my CMS is extremely quick and highly scalable.
3. Perl allows for rapid prototyping (as does PHP).
4. CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) means most problems are already solved.
5. Aaron Crane says I should (http://tinyurl.com/39plh)
6. Perrin Harkins says I should (http://tinyurl.com/3dwjl)
7. and so on…

Thanks for the link Ryan. I hadn’t heard of rssCloud before. Sounds like an interesting mechanism. I too will be keen to try this out when it is fully implemented and available.

I have changed the behaviour of the blogroll slightly. Instead of displaying the entire contents of the list, the handler now operates like a stack.

Only the 20 most-recently updated blogs are listed now. A blog’s position in the stack is related to it’s last update (most recently updated at the top).

This means that, where previously I had to be quite selective with the number of blogs I listed, I can now add all my favourites to the roll, without the list becoming ridiculously long. Individual blog links will move in and out of the list depending on the frequency of their revisions/additions.

I think this is a much more logical way of presenting the blogroll.