Unlike previous visuals, bloggers are represented by dots instead of their respective anonyms. Color assigned to any originating link from any single blogger is exclusive to that node and are shared by all the other links that may originate from that particular node.

This visual is based on 1465 distinct relations between 620 bloggers.

Also do have a look at our listing on visualcomplexity.

• Widget for Mac OS X Dashboard for viewing recently updated feeds.
• Keyword Cloud generated from current posts

enjoy!

This has been a long anticipated feature and it brings quite a bit of usability enhancements. First, the photoblog posts are separated and are not displayed within the blog posts content column reducing it’s length. Secondly, you do not have to click on a photoblog post anymore to view it, the thumbnail is simply displayed on the right column.

Currently we have disabled the description body field of the photo posts. But if there is a need for it in the future, we might as well bring it back. Secondly, only Flickr users are being aggregated now. And once if there is a redundant popular service elsewhere, we will gladly add support for them as well.

Keep your comments and suggestions posted here. And we hope you enjoy and appreciate the new features. There are more to come in the future including a separate feed for photoblogs and Flickr posts. Cheers.

Ok! The homepage now displays entries in a grouped-by-author fashion. First, it sorts the entries from the past 7 days by date and time. Then from a top-to-bottom sequence, groups entries by author. Every entry corresponding to an author that has been initially set as a grouped item will then be grouped for that author ad infinitum. So the result is more elegant, organized and most of all, a less initial view. If you have spotted the difference in the height in your web browsers scrollbar when viewing mvblogs, yes, that is because of this enhancement.

A grouped set consisting of 2 or more posts will have a link below it saying “+ n more posts by author within the week”. And when you click on it, the post is expanded displaying the rest of the posts by the same author below it with the whole set indented a bit to the right. On top of them all, will be a “-” icon with the name of the author and the day the last post was made. Clicking the “-” icon will contract the entry and display as it was before.

So enjoy the tweak and if you feel there are more positive improvements in this sense, feel free to comment and suggest them here. Cheers.

Most of the time the reason for some of the posts not being able to parse was due to invalid posts by users. And the php parser library is not as forgiving as it should be to non-tech oriented users.

Either way, the new blog parser uses a python library which is more brutal. So far it parses all the posts and generates the recently updated page every 2 hours. Earlier we updated posts every hour; but since 1 hour is too little exposure for new posts, we decided to expand the time between updates.

We have only upgraded the parser, the rest of it (including page generating), is still done by the same php tools we had before. Another small issue is that we assume dates on the feeds of the blogs are in a standard format (RFC 822, W3CDTF, ISO 8601) which we use to convert to MVT.

We are not sure how long the python parser can be sustained, anyway we are in discussion about a possible next version to which may possibly emphasize the purpose of mvblogs more.

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…? :)

My purpose of this post is to announce that besides this Development Blog, we also have a mailing list. The mailing list will be our sandbox for discussions. Anyone, be it developer, contributor, helper or observer are most welcome to subscribe to it if you would like to take part in the development of mvblogs.org. You can subscribe to it or view the current archives. Giving your ideas and thoughts and discussing them over the mailing list will be a valuable contribution from all in making mvblogs.org a better portal for the Maldivian blogosphere.

After a bit of thought so far, what I am suggesting is to make a small module, which lets each user to login and select their favorite blogs. After which the recently updated posts from the selected blogs by that user will be seen to the public in a different URI, (similar to delicious). Eg. If simon selects his favorites, it can be accessed from mvblogs.org/user/simon/ .

Something similar and more simpler would be perfect. If you do have more suggestion regarding this matter do comment on this post. Also keep in mind that we must try and maintain the open nature and the bottom up system we have tried to keep in this project so far.

http://www.mvblogs.org/linkcloud.php

Also, it is worthy to note that on this day, the most popular (linked to) blog is Choppey’s!