Well, I’m all done with exams now (what a relief)… so, this means I’ve now got a lot more time to get various things done including openFIRST/FIRST Blogs stuff. I hope everyone’s having a good time in Atlanta.

So, here (for reference) is my current new feature list for the next major feature rollout of FIRST Blogs and my progress thus far to completing them.

  • Feeds of new content that are potentially FIRST-related blogs incorporated into the moderator area (to help streamline the process of discovering new FIRST-related blogs) – not yet started
  • Automatic attempts at determining the RSS feed location from a blog address (to simplify adding new blogs for people) – researched, but, no code yet
  • Some method of viewing errors relating to a blog (to help moderators troubleshoot why something’s not working as expected) – errors are tracked, but, not separated, yet
  • Credits page for moderators (Give credit where it’s due) – not started (but I know the people)
  • Topic areas for blogs (to help combat information overload). – not started yet (any suggestions for topics?)
  • Custom reading lists (to let people pick and choose which blogs they’d like to view and to find out what blogs their friends are reading). – not started yet
  • Login system (to let people save the above settings and update/edit their listings in a more friendly manner) – not started yet (but partly researched to integrate with OpenID to let Live Journal people, etc. login without yet another password to remember)
  • FIRST Wiki integration (to pull down descriptions of blogs/teams where appropriate and use peer moderated descriptions of blogs) – code has been written, may require some tweaking
  • Updated layout (to better integrate with the rest of openFIRST) – Kayla’s been working on it

If you’ve got anything else to suggest or would like to lend me a hand I’d be glad to hear from you – tim@openfirst.org.