I have been fine tuning the website for the past few hours. Here is a list of some changes I made.

>> Formated the recently updated page and some other pages by placing necessary styling tags to the external style sheet

>> As senn suggested, I amended the creative commons content licensing note on the footer, to exclude from it contents from external websites.

>> Changed the default display of List page to sort by age, by ascending order. This way it would show youngest blogs first, which makes more sense, and goes better with the recently updated entry page.

>> I made an extras page, where some documentation about blogging (as simon suggested), and the blog export tool is placed. This page also has a little banner (by ayesh) with some html code for the users to link mvblogosphere from their blogs. (discussed with simon whether to have the image on mvblogs.org or to let the user save it on their host). I think if a user knows how to place some html code, they would know how to save an image as well? what do you think? Meanwhile keep on suggesting on what else may go on the extras page

>> I also got ayesh (who originally created the linkingdot logo, which she used colors taken from maldivian blogs) to make five variations of it and wrote a very tiny randomizing script to display it randomly each time the page reloads.

>> Also some typographic fine tuning has done on the blog template with the help of ayesh.

>> Senn and I thought that we should make initial page to point the recentlyupdated page.. so may be we need to put this tag header(”Location: http://mvblogs.org/recentlyUpdated.php”); which senn suggested on to the index page, during the launching. (before cutting the ribbon;)

>> I will edit the about page today sometime.

>> Also senn and I are thinking of launching the site friday early morning 00:00MVT.

Blog export feature is complete and is now listed on the top menu of the site a tool. As Shahee suggested, perhaps these “tools” should come under a “tools” main menu.

Blog export could potentially confuse a lot of people. While it is a just “exporting” a list of selected blogs so that it can be “imported” into something else - this concept is somewhat foreign and not anologous to how the web works. People don’t “export” stuff from the web, do they? And as crazy as it sounds, what is the use of the exported list?

So we definitely need to revise the name (follow up from a comment by Shahee) and also explain what it is all about.

Therefore, I’ve suggested that we host a few documents about bloggin in general.

Other than that I think we’re all set to go ahead and launch.

Good job everyone. I hope the logging of the development is helpful. Here are some of my suggestions.

>changing name of the rss xml file from on the header from latest.xml to mvblogs.xml. Also if possible add favicon.ico to it.

>changing name of the recentlyupdated file from lastupdated.php to recentlyupdated.php

>I think there was something wrong in the displaying of the line breaks of Dos’s romantic poem. Could it be something that needs to be tweaked?

>I thought the entries of the recently dated page were truncated to the nearest word. Anyway, as discussed on previous posts, it would look nicer to truncate to the nearest word and add something like […] at the end.

>the blog export page, is a very good idea, and would be great to make the task of the user as minimal as possible in the process of this. to do this, may be once the export is generated, show it on a page with the list of the selected feeds displayed (as on recently updated) and give an option as a link link marked as “subscribe to your feeds” or “RSS”, with the option to go back and edit the list… (this can be done even after launching). And after that probaly this also would need to be renamed from exportblogs to a more human name

>also, any documentation or the export blog page, and it’s functions are not yet visible on the dev blog.

>meanwhile i will tweak and add a bit more to the user interface, but it will be kept bare minimal.

These were going to be comments on previous posts by Inn and Shahee. Inn, well done! This is good work.

Some suggestions:
1. I think we should probably change the “LatestUpdated” to “RecentlyUpdated” - grammatically correct
2. Include a link in the header of the updates page so that the RSS feed of the updates can be automatically detected
3. Instead of the standards compliant date we should use human compliant “hours / days ago” for presentation (RSS feed can still have standard date)
4. A sentence worth of words from each updated entry is probably enough and would save space.

Ok then. I’ll post another update shortly.

Inn (developer) was invited to collaborate on the project last night. Within 24 hours (with steering and a lot of coffee from Simon and Senn) he has developed a fully functional tool to display the last updated posts from the mvblogosphere.

Right now it looks like the first phase of the project is close to an end. It may be a good idea to make it online after tweaking and final editing of the codes and design. I suggest that we open the page to public on Friday early morning. Also, I think we could remove the link which goes to google blog search page from the main menu. A mvblogosphere search tool could be another phase of the project. Also, an intelligent crawler is being developed by Jaa (developer/student) for another phase of this project

After launching the site, this blog activity may become less. And as senn suggested I too do not think that it’s a good idea to have a link to this blog from the main pages. But it may be a good idea to keep it in the text in the about page, once I re-write it after putting relevant credits.

At last. Caching has been carefully designed, developed and deployed and is properly running under a cron every 2 hours. I realized that while checking for already cached entries, it is not necessary to compare the data for altered ones as it doesn’t have any purpose (yet) on how we display the cached data. We do not yet have purposeful features that will alert of modified entries during the past week. So only new ones are added.

The ‘Latest Updated’ feature of the site is now running smoothly, except for some entry body text character encoding problems. I will be working on it every now and then to fix it and other tweakings, such as truncation should end with the end of a word not between one. The displayed times are in RFC 2822 formatted date in GMT.

Just finished coding the final cache update script. Once run, it will go through each blog in the database taking the feed URL, read the feed, go through each entry and check the date of each one of it. If the date is less than eight days, it checks if the entry has already been cached. If so compares the any difference and updates the cache. Otherwise it adds the new entry to the cache and continues the next item, and next blog.

Once fully tested and if it fits the situatation, the Latest Updated feature development will begin, which will make use of the data collected by the cache update script.

Now Shahee needs to check if the server provides crons. If it is available, you need to set a cron to run the script every 6 hours. So we can have a really updated cache.

Thanks for letting me onboard. My part is to develop the ‘Latest Updated’ feature of the system. First, Simon has to complete the required RSS Parser class which in turn is utilized by the RSS Seeker class.

What I came up with is, the system needs to keep a cache of the updates from blogs in a separate table. For this purpose, a database table and a cron has to be setup to automate the process (cron availability is necessary). It will run to Cache any updates and Dispose any Obsoletes.

The cache has to have an expiry period which myself and Senn thought of as 1 week. The cache is necessary to keep an internal history of updates. A set of records to compare any new results and normalize the data. From there onwards, we would have a set of data that we can manipulate and display in various manners for displaying and sorting updates from the relevant URLs.

I just realised that along with RSS Auto-Discovery the class (RSSseeker) needs functionality to detect and retreive the “title” and description of the blog. Currently there is no way of getting this information and it is also required for the OPML output.
This can be easily done by implementing an RSS parser (RSS/Atom etc) into the class.

Work, therefore, is still on-going and the features mentioned in the earlier post might not be available that soon.

mvBlogs.org is going to have RSS Auto-detect and OPML output capabilities. So hopefully in a couple of hours (given that I’ve yet to sleep) it should be up and running.

RSS Auto-detect will be added to Submit Blogs area and should, as it’s name suggests, automatically detect embedded RSS feeds in URLs.

Next is OPML output and it should, if properly implemented, allow visitors to export the entire list or a select list of blogs as an OPML file. This format is commonly used by RSS / News readers / aggregators (such as Bloglines / Newsgator etc) to exchange lists of RSS feeds.

I’ll be posting updates on the progress of these two tasks and the PHP class file here shortly.