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Simon Willison’s Weblog

Better blogrolling

Stuart at kryogenix.org saw my post about blo.gs and re-implemented his blogroll to update from his blo.gs subscriptions, complete with last updated times. It’s such a brilliant idea that I’ve implemented it here as well. blo.gs allow you to syndicate your subscriptons in various formats, but by far the most useful is favorites.xml, which orders them by last time updated and includes information on the time they last notified blo.gs of an update. It took less than 10 minutes to write a short PHP script to parse the XML and a few minutes more to set up a cron job to grab the XML file every hour. This is impressive stuff—thanks to blo.gs, XML and idea-sharing-via-blog myself and Stuart both have an automatically updated list of blogs right there on our sites.

Posted 6th July 2002 at 12:02 am

This is Better blogrolling by Simon Willison, posted on 6th July 2002.

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4 comments

  1. This is an off-the-cuff idea, but could you add an inert attribute to the links (like http://www.a.com?time=12:30) so that if a blog has been updated since I last visited it from your page the link will appear unvisited, and if it has not been updated it will still appear visited? Just something to think about.

    Micah - 6th July 2002 10:01 - #

  2. That's a really interesting idea, but it has the same problems as the cookie system over at kryogenix in that it only works if all visits are made through the same set of links. There's also a chance that the additional ? could break some sites. I'll give it a go though - if it breaks things I can always use a # url fragment instead.

    Simon - 6th July 2002 10:32 - #

  3. That's an interesting thought, though; I never thought of using the browser's links-visited memory. Instead of a "(new!)" indication, you could just set links that are new according to the blo.gs counter to class="updatedSince" and then style with an a.updatedSince:visited selector. Hm. Have to think about this some more.

    sil - 6th July 2002 10:42 - #

  4. Also, if you want this for your own personal use you could just make it into a Mozilla or Opera sidebar. It seems like I read about doing that somewhere recently, can't remember where.

    Micah - 6th July 2002 10:57 - #

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