I’ve now added the boards.ie and P45 blogs to POTB. I’m also amazed by all the coverage (Trust the Common Voice, POTB on Phones, PlanetOfTheBlogs Kicking IrishBlogs’ Ass, etc.) and linkage the site is getting.
My main worry is that if too many blogs are added, and the entries table keeps growing at this rate (currently at 4000 blog posts), then the current method used for full-text searching will become too slow - but that can be easily fixed. Also, the blogroll on the right is getting unwieldy! Needs smaller font…
I’ve turned off server-side caching at the moment, but I will have to turn this back on to reduce the number of database queries, then at each aggregation clear the cache so that pages can be refreshed. Currently, updates occur every two hours.
POTB has hit the 100 feeds mark, and I haven’t even submitted the boards.ie feeds yet (still investigating if we should stick with vBJournal or not). Thanks for all the positive feedback so far…
mysql> select count(*) from feeds;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 100 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
I had a message a few weeks ago from SS9267547 asking if he could take my vBFriends social networking add-on for vBulletin and incorporate some new features in a new release. He has done a great job, and the result is called vBBuddies.
During the development of my gaming site I was in the need of a hack that would display the buddies list publicly and I found one that I thought would work well for my needs called vBFriends. However I also found that it was in need of additional features to work more for what I needed it for so I modified this hack. Now with the permission of Cloud-Warrior (John Breslin) I’ve decided to release this little hack to anyone else who might find this useful called vBBuddies.
vBBuddies is similar to vBFriends however instead of showing all the members links (linked from, linked to, etc), vBBuddies simply displays all the members buddies only. Buddies that are of course linked back to the member. So for example a member named ‘Bob’ added a member named ‘John’ to his buddy list but ‘John’ didn’t add ‘Bob’ to his list. Now if that is the case, when looking at either ‘Bobs’ or ‘Johns’ public buddy lists you won’t see their names on there. However if both members add each others names to their buddy lists it will then classify that they are true buddies and put them on the list. Hope that makes sense. That’s pretty well what this little hack does.
In addition to the change above, I’ve noticed that there were two main features lacking from vBFriends that members have noted as well I needed done which was more optimized queries, templates and the option for multi paged system. So I’ve added those to this hack, I just hope that I was able to lower the queries down, think at this moment its at 10 total. Anyway enjoy the hack, hope someone else can find this useful.
There are 8 screenshots included for you to see what this little hack can do. Now this isn’t the greatest coded hack so I’m sure there are bugs. Please do let me know if there are problems with it and I’ll try to find the problem if I have then time to do so. Also if you like the hack make sure hit the install button! Enjoy guys!
I’ve made some POTB wallpapers, so now you can see what Dr. Zaius’ has been blogging about: POTB Wallpaper 800×600; POTB Wallpaper 1024×768; POTB Wallpaper 1280×1024.
Planet Of The Blogs (POTB) is now running the Planet PHP aggregator system.
Thanks to Planet PHP / Bitflux’s chregu and also to hg, I mangaged to get beta.planetoftheblogs.com working today. This is an example of where I was hoping to go with a server-side aggregation of Irish blogs since it features full-text search and maintains all entries in a database for later manipulation… In the future this site could have categories for other types of blogs (programming, gaming, regional, etc.) but for now Ireland is a good use case 
Since this requires PHP5 and I am unwilling / unable to install this at boards.ie, the beta site will have to remain on our DERI research server for now until I can upgrade and move it to a boards.ie machine.
I’ve changed the colour scheme of Planet Of The Blogs to something more ape-like; here’s a little POTB button to add to your blog sidebar.
I spent most of the day trying to install the Urchin RSS aggregator on either FreeBSD or Debian, but failed miserably in both cases through a combination of problems with Perl modules not installing fully or conflicting Apache versions. Urchin looks really nice because you can search not just the RSS but also any other associated article metadata added to RDF feeds. Anyway, my hero Hannes has provided me with a reference to a PHP-based alternative, so once I get that going we should have some search functionality!
Thanks for the quote Regi, and here’s the result:
In private, Dr. Zaius liked to blog…
I’m lagging behind on spotting this site, but I wonder how long it will be before “Rate My Lectures” appears (I see someone has registered the .com domain). A dangerous development IMO.
Interesting reading about the RTE widescreen tests on Sky Digital on the ICDG boards.ie forum. Also, BHG reports on his blog that ITV1 is FTA at the moment.
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