We’re getting involved with Six Sigma at work… vamos a ver que le puedo sacar a esto… Six Sigma is case studies and implementing solutions to increase efficiency within the company… or something like that…
I can’t say I know enough about it yet… I’ll explore more about it over the next few months and share my thoughts…
I started to re-design the site but I simply can’t find the time to do what I have to do. I asked a few bloggers to take a look at the previous designs as I was updated it but they didn’t like the backgrounds or colors very much… here is what it looked like the last time around. Granted nothing is validated yet… The Ajax coding for the RSS feeds is probrably the most interesting… If I don’t publish the new design I will look into coding the Ajax into the present design.
Y antes que se me olvide… the site will return to a basic hosting plan… There haven’t been donations this month, none the less any checks from Google in regards to Adsense ads and I’m not going to be the one bearing the cost of a dedicated server with out the support of someone else. Bloggers said they would chip in and others blamed me for sporadically asking for donations. I’ve come to realize that we all have responsibilities and I shouldn’t expect you to help out. Sooo… with that being said… I think I can manage a $4.95-$14.95 monthly plan for the time being…
Cheers!
Sweet… Sooo I think I spent well over 12 hours on this part of the project so far… You can view the output of the script here… I’m using MagpieRSS to fetch the feeds & PHP with MYSQL to use the database for the urls to the feeds.
I tried using MeshRSS, LastRSS and a few other scripts to fetch the feeds before. The problem was that they would either take forever to return the feeds or time out because of the number of feeds in the database.
If you do some research on Magpie everyone says that it works very well compared to the others… I’ll agree to that much but there were a few things that I didn’t like… one of them is the date on the atom feeds. If a blog from blogger.com is rebuilt, so are all of its posts and that’ll be enough to change the modified date for all of the posts.
Or maybe I’m wrong… I’m most probrably wrong but it sure sounds right… hehe…
Anyway… here’s magpie within my php function to fetch for urls….
function getposts(){
$myDB2 = new mySQLClass(DATABASE_HOST, DATABASE_USER, DATABASE_PASSWORD);
$myDB2->Database = DATABASE_NAME;
$myDB2->SelectDB();
$query2 = “get urls”;
$myDB2->Query = $query2;
$myDB2->Execute();
$cont=0;
while(!$myDB2->EOF && $myDB2->RecordCount > 0)
{
$myDB2->Fetch();
$row = $myDB2->Row;
$cont++;$urlrdf = $row['urlrdf'];
if ($urlrdf != “”)
{
$rss = fetch_rss( $urlrdf );
echo “<p>Blog: ” . $rss->channel['title'] . “</p>”;foreach ($rss->items as $item)
{
$href = $item['link'];
$title = $item['title'];
$in_date = “”;
$rss_2_date = $item['pubdate'];
$rss_1_date = $item['dc']['date'];
$atom_date = $item['modified'];
if ($atom_date != “”) $in_date = parse_w3cdtf($atom_date);
if ($rss_1_date != “”) $in_date = parse_w3cdtf($rss_1_date);
if ($rss_2_date != “”) $in_date = strtotime($rss_2_date);
if ($in_date == “”) $in_date = time();
$post_date = date(“F d, Y”, $in_date);
echo “<li>$post_date – <a href=$href&rt;$title</a></li>”;
}
}
}
$myDB2->FreeRecordset();
}
So that will soon be a new format for displaying the list of updated blogs on Blogs Dominicanos. I don’t think I’ll completely eliminate the ping form or the list for manual pings but this should be a nice addition once it is complete.
A few more things… cache is turned on and I will only use magpie to display all of the blogs with a valid feed. I have either erased blogs that no longer exist or disabled the blogs that do not have valid feeds. For those of you that publish You Tube videos on your blogs, some of your coding is wrong and your feeds do not validate (or You Tube’s coding is wron and they need to correct it for proper validation). After I publish the feed on the main page and you don’t see your blog on the updated list, login to the registration form, check your feed url, update it if need be and I will double check it once you have done so… OK… I hope thats it for now… I have to be at work by 9… I have to interview a candidate for the maintaince dept.
Cheers!
- Update – I’ve added the full code to the function… Alex, copy and paste is soo easy… 
Today has been productive i guess… 1000 out of 1600 done so far and the 1600 keeps getting smaller because there are a number of blogs that no longer exist… Maybe I should leave them in the database just for numbers, but whats the point… If the blog doesn’t exist I delete it… It’ll make who-ever navigates the directory that much more reliable versus a directory that is full of blogs that don’t exist or those that aren’t updated on a regular basis…
This picture was in on of the last blogs I checked today… It is an incredible picture… not as clean as the acclaimed picture taken by Steve McCurry… but it comes close to the same image and the meaning behind it…
via: Domingo’s Blog from Venezuela
I can wrap my day up on this note but I’ll try to finish the other 600 blogs tonight…. and not for nothing the little girl is a little scary too…
Today I will be updating the database with your Atom/RSS/XML urls… Some of you never inserted the url which is cool, but a good majority of you inserted the wrong address into the field… Soooo why am I doing this? well… I’m also re-designing the site. I’ve been playing with my files and trying to come up with different look. I have no idea of what I’m doing… The whole thing is that it’s hard to create a new look after getting used to the one we already have and have come to “love”. A new design would be nice but I don’t think it’ll be that much more different. However the new “features” or “goodies” as some may say might intrigue more visitors.
An AJAX platform for adding your own feed and customizing the sidebar. Different CSS Styles is another and the use of an agregator to display the most recently updated blogs in the database. Thats why I’m updating the database… My only problem is that your 1637 different urls… all of which need to be checked and updated accordingly. Thats going to take up all of my day… oh well… better me then you right… – that’s not funny…
Pero nah… I’ll do this for you, me, or anyone as long as I have the time… What else could I possible be doing on a bright and sunny day other then updating our database? Oh which reminds me… Everytime I find out something new about what I’m doing to the site (tearing it apart and creating useless scripts) I want to blog about it but its rough because I get caught up into it. For example… something real easy but perhaps something that most of the dominican bloggers wouldn’t care about… the curl_init() function…
If I can accomplish updating the database within the next few hours without getting bored or any other distractions such as food, I’ll move onto creating the code to grab the url’s from the database, caching the feeds, sorting them by date and perhaps coming back to blog about it… If you have any questions or comments feel free to do so…
By the way… this wasn’t my idea to do this. I hate giving myself work to do… Especially if I’m in it alone and without any references to go by… This is fun but not that much fun. This is the equivilence of picking your brain with tweasers, followed by being teased by a model, driving 140mph in a BMW and winning the 800 meters at the State Track Finals after being told you would never make it to the finals.