Going through and deleting a few old feeds on Bend Blogs today (there are a lot of ones that have gone private or haven’t updated in over a year, so expect many feeds to disappear), but a couple things that you might notice over there:
- No Categories Tab: I’ve gotten rid of the “Categories” tab on the left side, as I never seemed to be able to get it to work right with feeds that had categories. Everything’s going to tags instead. Speaking of tags, remember you can submit your own tags to any entry on Bend Blogs — like I added the tag Liquor to this post. When you click on the [edit] link to submit a tag, it will offer suggestions, if it can, based on del.icio.us tags, if available.
- I’ve added ads in a few more spots. Sorry, but it has to be done. The site’s getting more and more popular, and the server’s getting pushed harder and harder.
- Aforementioned removal of feeds (work in progress).
- But the biggest thing (and the thing I’m probably going to have to tweak a bit to make it less MySQL-server intensive) is the feeds list on the left side now sorts by the latest updated blogs (or at least close to it — it all depends on when the feed’s latest item was grabbed), making it far easier to keep track of blogs that update locally more often than the rest (their www and syndicating feeds links are right there).
- A few tweaks here and there to make the site easier to browse in general.
If you have any more bright ideas or suggestions, feel free to post a comment here (and yes I know the design is a bit stale, but haven’t had time to really get down and dirty with the CSS).
Comments
Some feeds I won’t mention by name (no need) blast out gobs of posts every day on topics having nothing to do with Bend. It would be nice if there was a way to filter out sources that annoy you.
Yeah, there are a lot of those, but as I mention on my submit page
Yes, there are a few locally that do that, but I can’t kick them off because of that.
Gregarius is slowly adding personalization features to their software so that individual users can set site preferences on feeds and such. But obviously that’s a huge undertaking, so don’t expect that to magically start working on BendBlogs anytime soon.
I didin’t ask for them to be kicked off, just an option for each user to be able to filter the feeds they don’t want to see. Hopefully that’ll be available at some point.
Yeah, I know which one you mean. It’s like having advertising in the midst of your television show. Except it isn’t costing them anything. I wonder if they know how to set up a feed so that people who have an interested can subscribe but the rest of us don’t have to wade through all the ‘ads’.
Oh well… otherwise, I greatly enjoy bendblogs. Thanks for your hard work.
Yeah, definitely, Bend Blogs is outstanding. Thanks, Jake.