Thursday, March 10, 2005

Blogrolling Suxors…

Well, not really… everyone has server problems, and if the server that has problems ends up serving whole parts of the blogosphere… well then… it suxors when something happens…

page loads take longer.
I can’t remember the URLs to my favorite blogs.
Reading goes down.
Traffic goes down.

WordPress has a nice link manager built in, but it doesn’t have the handy little notifications of fresh blogs that blogrolling has.

I could make an EE links blog, and use that to store my links, but it would lack the same feature that makes blogrolling neat (the fresh links indicator).

I don’t want to have to mess around and hackup EE.  I don’t want to swich to WordPress, EE is too modular, and WP is nice, but a step backwards.

But I have wanted to try WordPress out, so I installed it on my account.

Below the fold is what I have done to make a Blogrolling like list, as a backup if Blogrolling goes down.

First setup and install WordPress.  If you only have one MySQL database, it should work to put it in the same database as EE.  The WordPress tables have a wp_ prefix, so you’ll know which is which.

Then once you have WordPress setup, go into the link manager and import in your Blogrolling links using the blogrolling OPML link type.

There a WP link list.  Now, how can you make it work inside of EE?  Easy, cheat!

Make a WP template (a php file, think pMachine) that will only show the links, mine looks like this.

blogroll.php

<?php
// This is an example of a very simple template
require_once('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>
 <?php
 $link_cats = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
 foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
 ?>
  <b><?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?></b>
      <?php wp_get_links($link_cat->cat_id); ?>
 <?php } ?>

Then you can link to that template in EE, by creating a new template (or inside of where your blogroll is put), in my case, this is my template:

block/blogroll:

<?PHP
//replace the value of $url with your own link from the code generator
$url = "http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display_raw.php?blogrolling_key";
if($my_blogroll = @fopen("$url", "r")){
    while(! feof($my_blogroll)){
        $blogroll = fgets($my_blogroll, 255);
        echo "$blogroll";
    }
}else{ 
       require_once('http://domain.url/wordpress_directory/blogroll.php');
}
?>

That will use the WordPress blogroll only if the blogrolling server goes down.

Problems: 
keeping up two lists, one local, and one on blogrolling.
maintaining two systems (not really, but there is now a WP blog that is unused on my site).

There is a talk of an EE links module, but the developer is on a haitus/break… probably from pounding on the ‘polling all the blogs on my roll’ problem.


Posted by Jon in blogrolling • EE • geek • WordPress
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  • Avatar for jen: Register to customize your Avatar

    jen  on  03/10  at  06:37 PM


    That’s great - you should post something about it at the EE/pMachine forums.

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