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Simon Willison’s Weblog

More blogroll fun

Stuart has added an extra innovation to his blogroll. Clicking on a link there now sets a cookie (via javascript) recording your visit—these are then used to display a ’new’ icon if a blog has been updated since your last visit. The only downside is that the system can only track visits made through links on Stuart’s site. Stuart says that easily automated stuff like this is why he recommends using a system like Moveable Type rather than rolling your own blog software. He’s right, but I treat writing my own as an entertaining learning excercise—I get to play with RSS, web services, XML parsing, the fun never stops ;)

Posted 6th July 2002 at 10:41 am

This is More blogroll fun by Simon Willison, posted on 6th July 2002.

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2 comments

  1. Naturally, I cocked it up by not making the Javascript function set am expiry time on the cookie, so it died when the browser did. Fixed now. I might not have explained myself too clearly when I talked about MT; my point is that MT not only handled, buglessly, posting entries, posting comments, generating archives, ad nauseam, but it also throws in a lot of other little extras of which people have already thought, like pinging weblogs.com. These are all solved problems, and if I were rolling my own blog software I'd have to reimplement them, bah. As it is, I can concentrate on doing *new* stuff like the blogroll/blo.gs integration, which I reckon's a lot more interesting than just bringing JRandomBlogSoft up to parity with MT and Greymatter. And I get to implement the extra bits in Python, too, which is dead handy. :)

    sil - 6th July 2002 10:39 - #

  2. I agree completely - having MT handle all of the clever little extras like pinging weblogs.com is a very good reason to use it, especially if you want to expand the medium. That said, I'm thoroughly enjoying implementing the basic stuff as it lets me play with technologies I haven't used before. Plus I'm still the kind of programmer who prefers to write code than read it (I'll learn in time...) so implementing new stuff on top of my own code is preferable to implementing it on top of someone elses ;)

    Simon - 6th July 2002 10:47 - #

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