Greetings people!

As you may already have noticed, the recently updated page looks a bit ‘empty’ on days when photo bloggers blog simultaneously, in a short interval and in abundance. Even though we have a handful of flickr users listed at the moment, there appears to be a relatively large number of Maldivian flickr users. In all fairness we need to list them as Maldivian bloggers in mvblogosphere. However before we do, we need to tackle the aforementioned ‘problem’. What I have in mind is to separate photoblogs and traditional blogs, when presenting them on the recently updated page. To achieve this, database should be modified to include additional flag (may be something like is_photoblog) so that blogs listed as photoblogs can be ignored by the current parser. The ones listed as photoblogs should be parsed to a new one (which obviously we have to write) and generate thumbnails, store them locally (i.e. server), associate them with bloggers and put them on the right side of the main page. It is also highly likely that we need to modify the current schema to facilitate this requirement. The height and width of the thumbnails to be generated should be decided by visual designers (Shahee and Ayesh), if we have consensus on the matter.

I’ve created a static page to give you an idea of how it might look after bringing such a change. http://www.mvblogs.org/temp/mv.html. (Images used on this page are royalty free images)

The advantages we get by doing so are,

• Separate ‘written’ blogs from photoblogs
• Give more exposure to photographers?
• Can you think of anything else…? :)