So, the Xpress is putting together a local blog aggregator and blogroll to be a central resource for all local blogs, bloggers and blog readers. (It’s one of those “secret” projects I sometimes allude to in the Xpress’ “development pipeline.”) The site is called AVLLive.com.
It’s not really ready for the public yet—there’s considerable tweaking to do—but since you spiffy MX Boarders enjoy checking out such stuff, I thought I’d let all of you know about it first. If you have suggestions, ideas for improving it, notice things that don’t work right and so forth, we can use that information to improve it before we “officially” launch it.
Also, to save us all a little time, here are some known issues ...
1. The page loads kind of slowly. This appears to be due to the caching plugin not working with the “syndication” plugin we use to aggregate the RSS feeds.
2. The image sizes from some blogs sometimes break things. I’m looking at the best way to handle that. Incidentally, if this really bothers you, you can switch it to just the headlines by clicking on the “Toggle Posts” button on the right-hand side.
3. Sometimes, the posts are really long and it makes reading the page a drag. I’m looking for a good way to address this without resorting to using the “excerpt” function in WordPress, which I know from my experience with SparkleCityBlogs.com (which is very similar to this project) doesn’t work so well with the syndication plugin.
willc: Any idea how to force image-size limits in WordPress? It’s becoming something of a problem. There’s probably a plugin for it, but maybe you know of a more elegant way to handle it.
willc: Any idea how to force image-size limits in WordPress? It’s becoming something of a problem. There’s probably a plugin for it, but maybe you know of a more elegant way to handle it.
That is done using the image upload interface when you add an image to a post. WP will crunch the image down to the specific size you choose. There should be several options available in the interface.
I assume you are using the latest/greatest build of Wordpress? All those options should be in there.
As for tightening up the layout, maybe knock the font size of article text down a notch, and lessen the line-height in the CSS?
willc: Any idea how to force image-size limits in WordPress? It’s becoming something of a problem. There’s probably a plugin for it, but maybe you know of a more elegant way to handle it.
That is done using the image upload interface when you add an image to a post. WP will crunch the image down to the specific size you choose. There should be several options available in the interface.
I assume you are using the latest/greatest build of Wordpress? All those options should be in there.
As for tightening up the layout, maybe knock the font size of article text down a notch, and lessen the line-height in the CSS?
Also, that Mac theme you used is, well, overused.
All good points, particularly about the background and the line-height. Those are all the theme’s defaults, and we really need to change that to “own” the look.
Maybe I need to set the syndicated posts to run through the default WordPress post filters. I didn’t set it that way because I was a little concerned there’d be formatting issues from so many different feeds. But, it’s probably better to have the odd weird character or tag issue in the mix than a photo that breaks the table.
willc: Any idea how to force image-size limits in WordPress? It’s becoming something of a problem. There’s probably a plugin for it, but maybe you know of a more elegant way to handle it.
That is done using the image upload interface when you add an image to a post. WP will crunch the image down to the specific size you choose. There should be several options available in the interface.
I assume you are using the latest/greatest build of Wordpress? All those options should be in there.
As for tightening up the layout, maybe knock the font size of article text down a notch, and lessen the line-height in the CSS?
Also, that Mac theme you used is, well, overused.
All good points, particularly about the background and the line-height. Those are all the theme’s defaults, and we really need to change that to “own” the look.
Maybe I need to set the syndicated posts to run through the default WordPress post filters. I didn’t set it that way because I was a little concerned there’d be formatting issues from so many different feeds. But, it’s probably better to have the odd weird character or tag issue in the mix than a photo that breaks the table.
Keep these insights coming, everyone!
Oh I see the issue now: syndicated posts containing images. You should be able to override image size in your local CSS. For example, it might look something like:
#content img{width: 300px;}
That would cause any image in the main content area to be exactly 300px wide.
I was under the impression you were uploading these images yourself. Duh.
I fell asleep waiting for the site to load last night. Trying again…3 minutes, firefox, adblock, blank page. Turned off adblock, reloaded, it’s fine. Turned adblock back on, reloaded, still fine.
how is this any different from Blogasheville? I mean it looks to be the same blogroll…
BlogAsheville doesn’t aggregate content. It’s a great project, but fundamentally it’s a blogroll. There content only updates when one of the people with an account post something (or cross-post stuff), so it’s fairly static.
AVLLive.com, on the other hand, pulls content from these same blogs (and more) and posts it to the central site. As content goes up on their site, it also goes up on AVLLive.com (usually within 30 minutes or so). So, if you wanted to know “What’s happening today in the Asheville blogosphere,” you could go link by link on BlogAsheville or just read the frontpage of AVLLive.com.
On AVLLive, we’ve been getting around 10 to 20 new posts a day, and I expect we’ll probably double that as we add more local blogs that currently aren’t listed. Also, because a lot of blogs have archives, AVLLive has archived content from all the relevant local blogs going back a few years. (There’s already some 3,400 posts archived on the site.) So, if you wanted to know what was being blogged about in Asheville in May of 2008, that’s all available from the archive menu
I fell asleep waiting for the site to load last night. Trying again…3 minutes, firefox, adblock, blank page. Turned off adblock, reloaded, it’s fine. Turned adblock back on, reloaded, still fine.
This looks like it might be useful.
AdBlock shouldn’t impact this, but there’s clearly a load-time issue. I’m using Chrome, which doesn’t have Ad-Block, and it still fails to load for me sometimes. There’s an issue with the caching plugin, so that’ll have to be addressed before anything else is.
This is exactly the kind of stuff we need, though. Keep it coming.
OK, so I’ve changed some of the settings around, and it should load faster. It’s working for me—it loaded in about 5 seconds just now—but I need to make sure that’s not a fluke. Is anyone willing to try AVLLive.com again and see if the load time is better?
A traceroute reveals the requests are timing out for a bit after they reach mediatemple.net. Looks like they either have you on a slow server, have a bandwidth crunch in that router, or don’t know what they are doing. Considering one of the guys that started Media Temple bummed cigarettes off me all day at a conference I attended, my guess is the latter.
