[//edwin||reyes\\]

So I’m getting around to working on another form of publishing the most recently updated blogs for the Dominican blogosphere! Here’s what I have in mind.

We’ll be reading the directory feeds by category first and most updated second. This should allow me to break up the 3k(+) blogs and read their RSS/XML feed without timing the server out. Not having a dedicated server is definitely a drawback. Our hosting plan will only allow us to update 50-100 feeds per minute and we’re forced to watch the intervals in which we use the files to read the feeds.

Once the feeds are updated they will be sorted and updated dynamically. Similar to the excerpt. If you send a ping to bd.com, your blog will be moved up in the data base in order to be one of the first 50-100 blogs that are read by the files. Otherwise, your blog may be one of the last to be updated.

Although you ping the site, the list will be sorted by the last entry posted. If you send continuous pings to the site and don’t update your blog, it won’t mean a thing. The bottom line is that the new list will only display the blogs in the order in which they were updated.

At the moment, I am publishing the excerpt’s with an Ajax script. Nifty little thing that Ajax code. Wait until I can write the rest of the code for the list!

Update: After taking a closer look at the layout of the site and the number of posts that are actually published throughout the Dominican blogosphere, I must say that not too many bloggers are actually writing out there… then again I’ve only populated my database with about 200 feeds and the times are erroneous. Hopefully the times and frequency of published posts will reflect a more active blogosphere.

Only time will tell whats really going to happen.

I don’t think that having a polital blog as blog de la semana is such a bad thing during elections week. As I posted on bd.com I wasn’t too sure which one to pick. Not to mention that this whole selection process that people have in mind would never work out. I’m better off just picking one at random, verifying that it’s a ligit blog, has readers, has a decent design and we’re good to go.

For the most part, majority of the blogs in the Dominican blogosphere are hosted on blogger. Which tells me that there is little if any theme changes going on. In other words, looks can’t have too much weight in the selection.

Other then that, I look forward to reviewing the blogs history in order to make my decision. Sometimes its a good one sometimes it’s a bad one… my decision that is.

Google Reader can’t handle large amounts of RSS Feeds. I tried uploading an OPML file for all of the RSS feeds on the directory in order to eliminate Manual Pings. Unfortunately I don’t think we can go that route just yet. My account slowed down tremendously after I uploaded the OPML file with 2500 RSS Feeds of which Google Reader only recognized 1800. Moving onto the next idea.

It seems like the $1 ad space was the answer to my dilemma for the hosting costs. Thanks to those that actually placed an ad for this month! Our bill has been paid!

(more…)

From Blog Rating to Chronicles… oh yeah… another idea that went down the drain was the Chronicles… I don’t think that ever took off because I don’t think anyone is really into this blogging thing like we once were. It’s ok to have a Hi5 page and a MySpace because you simply don’t have to update it on a regular basis in order for you to get a comment or a new friend… after all it’s only a blog directory.

I’ll be downgrading our hosting service from a semi-dedicated server to a $7.95 hosting service as I was once told to do. Perhaps later on in life if my aspiring ventures take off we’ll be able to afford the fast wonderful server we have today.

Not too many new friends in this world… just real good old friends and weird acquaintances…

Below is the sample code you can use and modify to fit your needs. It contains all f the information you need before the advertiser goes to Pay Pal or any other method of payment you may have. I have eliminated the quotes from the code in order to display it.

<form method=post action=adboxes.php >

</form>

Here, is the adbox.php file you will need to create the email with the information provided and redirect the advertiser to PayPal or any other method of payment you may have. I have eliminated the double quotes from places you’ll see an *.

<?php

?>

I hope you find this helpful in creating your own. Cheers!

Since I published the ad space boxes on the pages of Blogs Dominicanos, I’ve received a couple of emails asking how it was created. The ad boxes is created through a list and the list is then modified using CSS code. Below is the coding for the style sheet I have on this blog. You can use it and modify the code to make it the size you want and with as many boxes you want. You’ll also need to create a form that will take the id number from the box the advertiser wants and insert into the email you will receive.

First things first, you need to create an DIV id for the ad boxes. This way you can make changes to the ul and li without affecting any other ul’s and li’s on the page. For all intensive purposes I’ve set my width to 800, you can set it to any width you want. Margin-left is for ie6 and ie7. Without the margin-left setting, you’ll have the ad boxes displayed with no indentation in FireFox and with indentation in ie7.

div#addbox {
width: 800px;
margin-left:0;
float:left;
padding-left: 0;
}

The ul (unoredered list) properties. Padding:0 removes the indentation in FireFox.

div#addbox ul {
padding:0px;
background-image:none;
margin-top: 5px;
float:left;
margin-left:0;
}

The following code sets the list style properties.

div#addbox li {
background-image:none;
display: block;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
float: left;
margin: 0 2px 2px 0;
}

The following code sets the list style properties of the background for the boxes with a hyper link. You can display them inline, list-item, compact, or in this case block style.I’ve also set the hieght and width for the boxes as well as the color.

div#addbox li a {
display: block;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
background: #7B97CB;
}


Hovering over the boxes changes the color. This is done with the following code.

div#addbox li a:hover{
background: #3E5793;
}

Once you have an advertiser and depending on whether or not you want to display the image with a border, you may want to change the following size of the border and perhaps add other styling such as border color etc…

div#addbox img {
border: 0;
}

The html code for the boxes is the same as any item list for an unordered list. I’ve removed the quotes so you’ll have to insert the quotes when you copy/paste into your files…

<div id=addbox>
<ul id=addbox>
<li><a href=http:// id=1><img src=http://image1.location.jpg/></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=2><img src=http://image2.location.jpg/></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=3><img src=http://image3.location.jpg/></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=4><img src=http://image4.location.jpg/></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=5></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=6></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=7></a></li>
<li><a href=http:// id=8></a></li>
</ul>
</div>

And this is what the boxes will look like…

Aqui esta la primera publicación de los detalles sobre nuestra encuesta de la blogosfera Dominicana.
508 total participantes

1. 150 mujeres
2. 358 hombres

Pasen por el blog de Noticias para leer todas las respuestas

Date formatting for Magpie RSS. This bit of code is simply to verify the date on the posts using the RSS Feeds within the database. I had a hard time converting the RFC822 date over to ISO8601 but I had fun doing it. I’m also sure that I’ll go back and clean the code even more…

I’m planning on implementing it within the next few days to stop the blogs that do not update thier site but update the list. This isn’t the remedy but it’s the only thing that I can do at the moment. Within the next few months I’ll try to implement an automatic RSS Feed update for the entire directory. Something I’ve tried to program before but to no avail… The database is huge and in order to cache the files that it needs to sort, it gets hung up once it gets past 100 Feeds…

$x=0;
$today_date = time();
$now = date("m.d.y h:m", $today_date);

blah blah blah...


Have fun copying and pasting

Oh! and if you think you can make the code better, knock yourself out… I’m open to ideas…

So here’s the scoop on the open source script that I used for our Blog Rating.

Masuga Design Unobtrusive Ajax Star Rating.

This is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done on Netflix or Amazon, all web 2.0-like with no page refresh. It is a major improvement on the previous version because it is now unobtrusive, meaning that if Javascript is off it will still work…

There are other sites using this script such as Design Fest, CSSRemix, and Sci Talks.

They’ve all modified the stars and the script… I don’t know who can simply plug and play other then a Word Press plug-in for rating posts or similar rating scripts with one line of code.

I opted for these files because it was using php and interacting with MYSQL database info. All of which was incorporated into our current database. I had to modify my current function which creates the list of recently updated blogs with the rating function.

Total amount of time playing with the code was about 12 hours… on and off for 5 weeks… I finally sat down and re-wrote the function today.

The one thing that I have noticed before is that in any Internet Explorer older than version 7.0, the stars do not appear correctly. Perhaps that is my CSS file but I’m not messing with it anymore.

One of these days I’ll re-launch the option to create your own wordpress blog on BlogsDominicanos. I need to clean that old database and work on the files again…

Con un promedio de 500 respuestas que sigue creciendo día a día, me toca analizar los resultados cuando llegue el tiempo. Me parece sorprendente que aun publicado en Remolacha.net y Blogs Dominicanos, la forma que tuve mejor comunicación con aquellos que participaron fue vía email. Cosa que me lo encontré raro… pero exitoso de toda manera.

Ahora, si participaron en la encuesta recuerden que habían preguntas con respuestas abierta para que ustedes expresaran lo que querían… Le puedo decir que las respuestas varean de todo un poco.

Un ejemplo… Que pasos tomarías para cambiar/mejorar la blogosfera?

Que hubieran mejores portales hacia los blogs en español; por ejemplo, que el portal de entrada a blogs dominicanos incluyera una selección de los más leídos, de los más recientes, los más interesantes — como si fuera una revista que enlazara a blogs

Tratar de que no se repitieran tanto las mismas noticias, aunque cuando sean de importancia, si es necesario. Cada blog tiene sus lectores, aunque sean un chin, pero hay una repetidera molestosa y algunos quieren ser chistosos sin poder, poniendo titulos con faltas ortográficas o muy vulgares.

Estas respuestas tendré que agrupar las de una manera sencilla ya que son parecida a otras pero con diferente palabras.

Ahora, esto es en nuestra blogosfera… y en la blogosfera de España, México, Perú, Colombia, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, Ecuador… etc… cuales serán los pensamientos de aquellos bloggers que actualizan su bitácoras?

Por lo que eh leído en algunas de esas bitácoras puedo decir que hablan mas o menos de lo que se habla en nuestra. Pero por que estamos tan desalojado de uno y el otro? Sera la falta de ortográfica de nuestra/mi parte, el lenguaje con la que escribimos/escribo, o sera el estereotipo que nos hemos puesto, o simplemente sera porque yo no leo aquellos que están en esas blogosfera?

Me parece que los españoles toman la blogosfera un poco mas en serio que otros y que han podido utilizar la blogosfera como un espacio de proyectar sus ideas para mejorar la tecnología, el diseño gráfico, y su cultura.

Tendré que ser maestro del intercambio cibernautico o un psicólogo para poder dar la respuesta correcta. Tal ves pueda ser que los profesionales que utilizan sus bitácoras para proyectar su imagen de profesional no les interesa la vida de otro. O tal ves uno mismo a escrito un post que no le cae bien. Quizá no tiene nada que ver uno con el otro.

Al fin, aquellos bloggers que son bien conocido comparten lo mismo que compartimos todo… historias, fotos, cuentos, y su cultura… solo me queda en estar interesado en lo que escriben y de cambio nos haremos amigos.

Así es, estoy por crear una data base de los eventos que se a llevado a cabo en la blogosfera Dominicana. Me parece ser algo difícil de hacer… aqui esta una razón.

Mucho detalles en cada entrada. Los detalles están excelente porque des de esa entrada puedo leer las entradas de otros bloggers y así por el estilo. Las crónicas de eventos serán publicada en Blogs Dominicanos al estilo de archivos por fecha.

Hoy pase un buen tiempo navegando por 5 blogs y encontré mas de 200 eventos/entradas que yo consideraría relativo. Son muchos los eventos que pasan en nuestra blogosfera mensualmente… por si no lo sabían… ah! y eso que no e pasado por Remolacha.net todavia…

La vida del blogger Dominicano es normal… no creo que es diferente al que no tiene un blog. Algunos publican todo lo que le ocurre en 1 día, otros apena escriben poemas o repiten lo que leyeron en Remolacha.net con su propia opinión del articulo que enlazaron… Cifras que al fin de la encuesta publicare.

Pensándolo bien estoy un poco alojado de la blogosfera y quizá esta son iniciativas que tomo como forma de informarme yo mismo de lo que esta pasando. Obviamente lo hago para los demás también porque quien se va a poner a programar un formulario a las 8 de la noche y estar fuñiendo hasta las 2 de la mañana. Yo nada mas. Que bien… así que, si ustedes pueden ayudar a crear esta data base se lo agradezco.

As many of you may or may not know already, I published the second round of questions for my survey. I think that the results of the surveying should be interesting. I plan on publishing the results towards the beginning of next year… So for those that are anxiously waiting to read something about it, please be patient.

The blog rating has been a pain in the ass… The function needs to create a php function that will generate the stars as the page opens. But since I am already in a function I can’t echo the php code in order to populate the star rating.

However I can display the results which is a good thing. I just need to decide how I want to display the star rating if thats the case… Perhaps I’m just making it more complicated the it really is. I’m sure that the programming of the function to echo the php code can be integrated into the function that displays the list. That would be quite a lengthy function and I’m not too sure if it would execute as efficiently. Not to mention that I would have to hack the code that the star rating uses in order to include it into my function.

If you want a hack at it let me know…

Ayer recibí un mensaje preguntando si nuestro directorio esta a la venta… hmmm…

Help is on the way!

I was about to post an image of my hosting account summary for those that doubt that I pay $75.00 a month for a semi dedicated server. But that’s all good. why bother…

I think I’ve made my decision to leave the site up pending that I transfer the files to another hosting service @ $50.00 a month. It is a virtual dedicated server with Media Temple. If by chance the service goes down for what ever reason, I will be bringing it back to Host Gator.

For those that doubt, or do not trust me (a Dominican), I am 100% with you. I don’t trust too many Dominicans myself. If I make a donation to a website or any type of fund raiser, I wonder if the people that truly need it, get it. My response to you… The site is still up right?

Thats leaves room to question how much money of which has been donated for hosting payments has been put towards the hosting payment. After all, I am the one that pays for it… And I think I’ve managed the “Honor System” quite honestly… So find something else to talk about…

I don’t want publicity.
I don’t want to close the blog.

I just want to write about what I think…
No thinking it over.
No proof reading.
No worrying about being ridiculed.

You don’t like it… Who cares…
The rest is up to you.

An yes I know, It’s not a poem…

Thanks Alex for the $20 bucks… It truly helped not to mention you were the only person to send anything. The rest of you, thanks for taking the time and leaving your comments. I know we don’t all make 120k a year and your moral support of wanting to making things happen isn’t always enough.

Honestly speaking, (this is just my personal opinion…) between the time I was in Dominican Republic and the time I’ve been back… which has been about what… 3 weeks? I can’t say I’m impressed with the support that the Dominican Blogosphere has to offer. Particularly those living in Dominican Republic.

I think that those of us living outside of the country have contributed more in many other ways and have come to share and express true love to a culture that we desire to be in more so then those that are already there. That’s just my personal opinion and I hope no one gets offended as many people may.

On my arrival back home I was faced with the most oddest request with from one person that helped me organize the visits. I mean, not only did I take time off from work, make dozens of phone calls from my company cell phone, travel from Jarabacoa to St. Domingo the three days I was there, treat those that I was with, donate the things I donated… but the person had the audacity to ask for a favor in return… As compensation for organizing our visits, that they were depending on $50-$100 towards a new piece of equipment they needed for personal use. WTF!?

I’m not being fesicious when i say that NY Dominican Bloggers have contributed more then those living in the country, but I think we have.

Como que le quieren sacar aprovecho a algo que es tan sencillo y tan “que se yo”… sin mente diria yo… talking about having a blog radio show that is broadcasted nationally, using blogs as a spin off to new television shows, it’s hilarious. I mean how much about blogs can you really talk about and how much about blogs do you really know!? what is there to know?! All you can do is invite publicists and journalists that already have blogs onto a show and ask the same questions over and over… No originality whats so ever.

Peridismo ciudadano ok… ta bien… eh… eso de estar dando “Talleres”… pero ven aca… and you get paid for it!? hahaha… I don’t know. Showing someone how to turn a computer on is bad enough but they need a computer before they know how to surf the web, never the less post a picture on a blog.

And what ever happen to an interview they supposedly recorded? I certainly didn’t recieve any email regarding its broadcast… not like I was talkative… but it’s the principle… personally I didn’t make it much of an interview because it was lame to ask me the same questions to which the answers were quite clear… For example…

How did BlogsDominicanos.com start?

Did you want a 5 second reference to the url blog post or do you want me to start from the begnining?

All I can ask is that you take it with a grain of salt and forgive me for my honesty.

Soo… with that being said I’m ready for my mouth lashing from so many of you that have never commented on my blog before. Tell me it’s a lie and that I have no idea of what the fuck I’m talking about.

if it’s written in English?… The Answer…

¿Eres humano? Si no lo eres no puedes registrar tu blog. Ayer me puse a activar mas de 1200 blogs que registraron… lo malo de eso era que habían algunos 900 registrado por Spammers. Pero espero que la ultima pregunta resuelva eso… cheers!

Para los que le gustan dolores de cabeza averiguen lo que esta pasando aqui…

Requesting the information…

<label>Si eres Humano entra el numero 1510.</label>
<input tabindex=”17″ type=”text” name=”info” value=”" size=”41″ maxlength=”255″ />

Passing and executing the information…

$info = strip_tags($_POST['info']);
if ($info !=”1510″){$url = ‘http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/blog’;}

Passing & executing the information again…

$query = “select * from vb_weblogs where url = ” . “‘” . strtolower($url) . “‘”;
$myDB2->Query = $query;
$myDB2->Execute();
if($myDB2->RecordCount > 0)
{$goto = “repetido.php”;}
else{…