Charlottesville Blogs, relaunched.

At long last, I have moved Charlottesville Blogs over to a different aggregation package. As I did a couple of months ago with Virginia Political Blogs, I’ve switched from the unreliable Planet over to the far more reliable (and robust) FeedWordPress. It has the same simple look as always, and I’ve aliased all of the old URLs to the new URLs, so nothing should break, including your RSS reader.

What has changed is the updating methodology. It used to be that the site would update all 224 feeds every thirty minutes. FeedWordPress works differently. Every site has been assigned a random wait time (a TTL, for you DNS geeks) that varied wildly from as little as half an hour to as long as a day. (That’s much too long — I’m trying to find those and take them down to a couple of hours.) Then there’s a process that fires up every 15 minutes, figures out every blog due for an update, and it polls all of them. So your blog entry may not appear for as long as a couple of hours after you post it. But the result is the elimination of these enormous updates, which makes it easier to follow but it’s also less bandwidth intensive, both for my site and for Charlottesville blogs.

What I love is that FeedWordPress doesn’t break. Though it’s exhibited the alarming habit of periodically dropping people’s blogs from the system entirely, it’s not subject to the show-stopping problems that have required that I laboriously debug precisely which of the 224 feeds is causing the problem. This occurred at least 2-3 times each week with Planet, with each debugging session running between twenty minutes and an hour. Life’s too short to be doing that kind of thing.

So, this is the new Charlottesville Blogs. Enjoy.