Local blogroll!

Ok, so we've only got like 15 blogs in the blogroll so far, but one of the things that's amazed me is how up to date they all are. As I write this on Monday, the most "out-of-date" blog was last updated on Friday. I was expecting there to be a much wider spread in the Updated dates.

Justin, is it possible to make available a single OMPL file of all the blogroll feeds, so those of us who use a feedreader could import all of the feeds at one shot?

anything is possible. actually rob zelt mentioned that in an email and i mentally put it on my todo list.

Good idea, Justin! I like your proposed policy.

Justin, right on.

anton, as far as i'm aware, the back and front doors are open. go ahead and add yourself.

ruby, here are some suggestions for a simple policy:

add yourself to the blogroll if you:
-live, work, or spend leisure time in orange county
-blog about orange county
-participate in orange county politics

please choose a location that best represents where you live.

ruby, we should probably add a location option that says something like "Outside the Triangle"

That's a great question, Anton. I'm interested to hear what other think about this. My feeling is that if you write about things in Orange County (which you do) then you should count.

The question then becomes how to classify you. Should your location be Chapel Hill (where you work and play) or Durham (where you live)? I really don't know.

i tend to err on the side of inclusiveness. though location is open to interpretation---no one exists in a single point in space, i tend to view it as where the author/blogger resides. so for you anton, i'd assume it would be durham.

on the other hand someone could live on the durham side of meadowmont, but work and live and socialize in chapel hill, in which case, chapel hill.

location is really just another subjective data point to make this blogroll tie more closely to our physical community.

"location is really just another subjective data point to make this blogroll tie more closely to our physical community."

Justin - that's a great point for us to discuss at the Triangle bloggercon, and something I'm very interested in following: how to build a physical community through a cybercommunity. I'd appreciate if you left the backdoor open for me, for while my mailing address is certainly Durham and my current paycheck comes from Raleigh, when it came time to organize that bloggercon, I placed it in Chapel Hill (for good reasons, of course). I would recommend to you and Ruby to put up a short policy about the blogroll (and site, for that matter) and what location means. It shouldn't be a barrier to the voices of people who truly are part of the community but may not sleep there.

Justin - Bravo, and nice work. What's the policy for the blogroll - if I were to add my blog, it would indicate I'm blogging from Durham, which isn't in Orange County. Yet I'm still an owner of Weaver St. Market, my daughter attends preschool in Chapel Hill, and my wife will start at UNC Law this fall. My home may be in Durham, but my heart is in Orange.

I made a OrangePolitics.org button for the Local Blogroll. I'm going to put it on my site and link to this page.

Feel free to use it if you want. Here's the link the file. Please download it and put it on your web server.

http://www.audioactivism.org/archives/OP_Blogroll.png

ruby, is that list being provided by bloglines, or are you updating it in wordpress? can you change the dot-dot-dot one to rebecky? can you include in text after the link something about the location, perhaps city?

are people from durham and wake counties allowed? i'm just wondering what does it means to be a local blogger? anton and i had this problem with tarheelbloggers, wondering what it meant to be a tarheel. perhaps if cities are included after each link, that issue would be moot because the person interested in those links could mentally exclude someone from pittsboro if they wanted.

in a perfect world, it would be nice if the local blogroll was ordered by most recently updated/posted. perhaps this is something to think about for our "proper aggregator". and maybe a format that looked like this for each entry:

justinsomnia by Justin Watt of Carrboro

Justin, the list is maintained in my bloglines account. As such it takes the title automatically from the blogs' own feed. I don't know why Rebecky doesn't have a proper title in her feed, but all she has to do is change that and it will be updated here.

My definition of local bloggers are people that live in Orange County (and possibly also who write about it). People in Durham and Raleigh are already collected in the Triangle area section of NCblogs.com.

So when do you want to start working on that aggregator? ;-}

i'm already researching some things (php rss parser, running php from the command line) as well as an effective design. i'll see how much progress i can make on the first two things tonight and get back to ya.

Not my favorite megacorp in all the world, but this week, TIme Warner will add a blogger list to its portal website. A sneek peek is available here at http://www.aroundtownnc.com/news/weblogs.cfm
... it's expected to go live early this week.

Interesting, Jean. I started to write to say how lame they are for not including OP... Then I started to write to them to politely suggest adding OP to the list... Then I looked again at the list of blogs and realized that with the exception of your blog, they are all conservative. Every last one. It's like they generated the list from looking at a Republican's blogroll.

It seems that Time Warner has a skewed idea of what people think around here. Anyone else want to join me in letting them know what you think of this? Make sure to let them know if you're a T-W customer.

What?! Time Warner ... SKEWED?
I'm SHOCKED!!!! LOL

i would be curious to know who's responsible for that? btw, ruby, OP is up there now... look like we've got some competition.

OP is there now because I wrote to them. They responded that the list is a work in progress, so people should definitely drop them a line and make suggestions. The page isn't available to the public yet, we're only getting a sneak peek thanks to Jean.

Competition, ha ha.

To suggest a blogsite to the Time Warner portal, go to http://www.aroundtownnc.com/feedback_form.cfm?url=Suggested%20link%20for...

My blog is listed up top there, but I didn't even know that I had an Atom, RSS, etc. feed, which is a stated requirement. I thought I actually had to, um, do something to make a feed happen. Who knew?

Other local blogs that I know of:
Dirt Under My Nails
Jean Ferguson's blog
Amalgamations of El Jefe
Right and Exact

Also - you going to include Livejournals in that list too? Because I know a lot of local Livejournallers.....

With the conference approaching and increasing local excitment about blog rolls and content aggregators, I've put some ideas that I've been thinking about online and would be interested in some feedback. The test site is located at http://www.ourwords.net

I've just gotten back to updating my weblog, and plan to update at least once a week from now on. After my experience Monday on The State of Things, I've finally found a name for it!:

What's your question?

9 days later, i've tried to put my money where my mouth was on the first comments i left on this post. please play with the new dynamic blogroll and let me know if it breaks.

Justin, you rock! Thanks so much for your hard work on this.

There are a few things we will need to do to make this work better. For example, the links currently become illegible when you mouse over them. Also, the list of blogs needs headings to clarify that the date shown is the last update.

Also, I wonder if we should even include blogs not based in or about Orange County. What do others think? Any other suggestions for improving this?

Great idea. As you can see I did test it out and sent the results on to Justin.
One thing I would add now that I've thought a bit is a feed link for each blog so's you could add the ones you like to your own aggregator easily. Should be simple since you have that info already. Sorta like http://ibiblio.org s Feed Central that Fred S set up.

Ruby, I'm not sure if there is a way to use a css pseudoclass (:hover) inside an inline style rule to make hovering turn white. So I may have to create a mini style sheet for this plugin (which would be better in the long run)... As you can see I've made some other modifications to the look and feel. Feel free to comment.

Paul, Ruby the feed URL is now available as a link from the date. Does this make sense? When you hover, there's a tool tip that explains, but I worry it may be confusing... Perhaps it should open in another window or perhaps left-clicking should cause a javascript "alert" popup? All of which sounds like plastering over a bad UI decision. Let me know what you think.

I'd do something like:
date location name [xml image] author
hiding the rss/atom/xml under the date is funky and not intuitive.
you've got layout problems on this page (under firefox). maybe time for a custom page?

paul, can you email me a screenshot? perhaps there are problems with FF on mac? looks ok to me in FF and IE on WinXP.

Justin, a suggestion: "Just enter the URL of your blog" is a bit confusing. Do you want the top-level url, or the url of the feed?

Anton and everybody else, the form expects your blog's "top-level" URL and will try its best to auto-discover your feed. If it fails, it will prompt you to enter the feed URL.

Speaking of "download it and put it on your server," it looks like your orange XML icon is my PNG version of the original GIF (great, good for you!), but you seem to have forgotten to point to your own copy, rather than mine. I can certainly afford to lend you a little bandwidth, but you probably don't want to risk the sort of thing that happens when I get bored, and drunk, and mischevious ;)

My bad, Phil!

I did that really quick as a placeholder and then I forgot to replace it with my own graphic. Will fix it ASAP.

Again, I apologize. Thanks for pointing it out.