The software that I was using to run Virginia Political Blogs has proved unable to handle the number of sites listed, so I’ve moved to FeedWordPress, following the lead of Southwest Virginia Blogs and Richmond Virginia Blogs. The number of blogs listed remains problematic, so updates are staggered: 25% of blogs are updated every 15 minutes, with all queried hourly. Plus, the new software doesn’t suck so much that it makes me want to stab myself in the eye with an unsharpened pencil, and that’s nice.
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Does an unsharpened pencil hurt less than a sharpened one? Do you know anyone who’s tried both ways?
It looks good.
I don’t doubt we’ll find lots of bugs soon enough. :)
Oh, and I think an unsharpened pencil would hurt a lot more. A sharpened pencil would displace a lot less tissue upon entry to the sclera. But I don’t intend to check on that.
I dig the new look.
Or perhaps you digg the new look.
Can I be added, please?
Of course — I’m sorry I omitted you.
I had to added site manually, typing in the URLs one at a time, because it was faster than writing an OPML parser. If anybody else was listed yesterday and is gone today, please let me know and I’ll get you added again.
Thanks! :)
First, great service – appreciated by many, I’m sure. Second, is there a function where it might take a slug (say, the first XXX words or something) from the post, instead of the whole thing? I just saw that my recent entry on Cape Town (of very little interest to most VPB users, I’m guessing) just took up an enormous amount of space on it (as well as having graphics that push into the right column . . .). I can fix that on my end by using a more break, or something, but it may be something to consider for all . . .
I have considered that. It wasn’t feasible with the code that I was using before, but this new software does make that possible. I think Richmond Virginia Blogs‘ approach — which truncates posts after a paragraph — is a good one worth emulating. On the one hand, truncating posts would make it harder to use the site as one stop shopping, which I know many people value. On the other hand, truncation would require that readers click over to the blog to continue reading, which would give many bloggers a better idea of how many people are reading their blog entries.
The catch is that breaking posts down to that excerpt necessitates stripping out most of the HTML and all of the images. There at least a couple of Virginia bloggers who are artists, and whose blog entries consist of images. I’d hate to leave them out in the cold.
As I told you in an e-mail, Waldo, it looks great. Congrats.
Yay! Welcome to THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!! Or wordpress. Congrats on the new site, it looks great.
Re: Artists: RVABlogs has a large community of artists who blog regularly. Most of them, I guess as a result of RVABlogs, have taken to introducing their mostly visual posts with a bit of text. Not that RVABlogs is trying to change or drive how people are blogging, but it seemed to sort itself out.
Also I am a super big proponent of driving as much traffic to the individual blogger’s sites as possible. That is where the real discourse (hopefully) takes place.