Jordy Blog

Sweet Syndication – ConnectBlogs is Reborn

The aforementioned new version of ConnectBlogs.com rolled into production last night. It will be a process of ongoing improvement, but I’m really happy with what we have now. I think a lot of people will find it to be a valuable resource, and I personally hope it makes the Utah business and tech communities a little smarter and a little tighter. Check it out and let me know what you think.

Note: I’ll soon be posting some guidelines for people that want to be (or remain) syndicated there. It’s basic stuff: a clean and relevant feed, no ads, no offensive content, try to stay mostly on topic, etc.

Note 2: I’ve already started syndicating a very non-comprehensive list of Utah business bloggers that I personally like to read. If you are one of them and for some reason don’t want to be syndicated, just drop me a line and I can remove you right away. I’ll be personally contacting each one to make sure it’s OK.

Note 3: Some of the people that were posting on ConnectBlogs.com won’t have their old posts show up for a day or so while I work out some glitches. Nothing to be worried about here. :)

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ConnectBlogs (Version 2)

I apologize that I haven’t posted in a while; I’ve been pretty busy with a number of things: my day job as website manager at Overstock, a lot of website contracting and consulting work in the evenings, my usual slew of volunteer projects, and most recently (and notably) setting up the new version of ConnectBlogs –which is not live yet, but should be very soon.

ConnectBlogs will be moving to more of a syndication model, which I believe is more in line with what the Utah blogging community (myself particularly) expected. So in addition to the current “resident writers”, the upcoming version of ConnectBlogs will encourage Utah bloggers to post on their own blogs and have their content aggregated based on how they tag (or categorize) it. ConnectBlogs will be an ad-free gesture to the Utah business and tech communities. We’ll get your content in front of a lot of people, and we’ll also provide plenty of backlinks.

So if you’re a Utah business or technology blogger and would like be included in ConnectBlogs, drop me a line with your name, URL, and feed URL (if you know it). There are some basic (and yet unpublished) rules on what and who can be syndicated, but I think most people who read this will qualify.

Category-Specific Feeds in WordPress

Most people don’t know this, but WordPress automatically builds RSS feeds for specific categories. So if you wanted to syndicate only “tech” stories from the Jordy Blog, you could use this feed:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3

To view which id you could use for a category-specific feed, just click on a category and see what is listed in the address bar. If you don’t see a number, the blogger is probably using a non-default permalink structure (which is good for SEO purposes by the way).

(If a WordPress blog has nested categories, a feed of a parent category will automatically grab any stories belonging to child categories, so there’s no need to classify a story in multiple categories of the same lineage –the most nested applicable categories will do. That also means that there there’s no need to subscribe to a child category’s feed if you’re subscribed to the parent.)

Another cool trick is that you can syndicate several categories at once, and WordPress is smart enough to give you only one instance of each unique post (even though a story might be listed in two or more separate categories). For example, here’s how you would syndicate just my Technology and Business categories:

http://jordy.gundy.org/wp-rss2.php?cat=3,2

No dupes!

But there are several reasons why you might not want to syndicate by category:

1) Category syndication is a little tricky, and you’re lazy.

2) Most bloggers don’t know that the feature is available, and if they do, they know that almost no one uses it. They are unlikely to cater to your needs, categorizing and nesting appropriately, etc. And if they ever move their blog, they’ll likely not redirect category-specific feeds.

3) Category specific syndication means you might miss out on some cool content (especially on the Jordy Blog).

Overall, category-specific syndication is mostly handy for blog aggregation since you may want to syndicate several people’s views on ‘X’, but don’t really care about ‘Y’, and ‘Z’. But since most people aren’t aggregating blog feeds, most people don’t care.

Do you?

Utah Open Source Bloggers

My brother set up a Utah Open Source Planet to aggregate posts from anyone who’s an “Open Source FRIEND/USER/HACKER/ZEALOT” in Utah. If you live in Utah, love open source, and want to be aggregated, just follow his submission instructions.

Other good resources for Utah Open Source Junkies:
Utah Valley Linux User Group
Greater Utah BSD User Group
Ogden Area Linux Users Group
Provo Linux Users group
Salt Lake Linux User Group
Utah Ruby Users Group
Utah Python Users Group
USU Free Software ang Linux Club
Utah PHP Users Group
BYU Unix Users Group
and #utah on freenode IRC.

I was going to add the BYU Ruby Users Group, but it looks like they’ve been hacked. Don’t Google it unless you’re F-Bomb insensitive.

Planet for Blog Aggregation

I just finished setting up Planet blog aggregation software on planet.provolabs.com. It clearly needs some CSS work done on it, but all of the functionality is there.

I was worried that (without an prepackaged RPM) setting it up would be difficult, but installation was much easier than I anticipated. Because it’s just a python script run on a cron job, there were no new dependencies to resolve. Thanks for the help, Gabe.

As a side note, I’ve also added a bunch of much-needed links to my blogroll. Sorry to those of you who had been shunned for so long! Obviously there are more to add.