Tim Ginn’s Personal Blog

We face an interesting problem at FIRST Blogs, which is, how exactly can we find FIRST bloggers and alumni? We’ve been somewhat successful in having people actively seek out the site and add their own blog, but, that doesn’t seem to work as well for alumni who are no longer actively seeking out FIRST information. Every now and again we’ll import the list of people who have joined a FIRST Robotics community on a specific blogging host like Live Journal; but, that misses a lot of the independent bloggers who set up their own sites (many of whom have the more interesting and in depth technical entries that I personally enjoy).

One of the things I tried a while ago that didn’t work too well was looking for sites that link to www.usfirst.org. This turned up a large number of news sites (including small town newspapers) that were mainly articles spreading information about FIRST. It’s interesting stuff; but, not blogs, and not what I was looking for.

Here’s how I’ve been automatically discovering some neat FIRST blogs (and some interesting blogs that don’t happen to be FIRST-related).

• Technorati - Search for FIRST Robotics
• Google Blog Search - Search for FIRST Robotics

I’m subscribed to the RSS feeds of both those result pages and when I see something interesting I’ll add it to the queue

If you’ve got a better way to do this, or any other suggestions for things, let me know.

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.

Those of you following the FIRST Blogs RSS Feed may have noticed that for the past little while (depending on your RSS reader software) there have been no new blog posts. This was due to some bad RSS created by a mistake in my processing of content before it’s inserted in the feed. The bug’s been around for a long time but didn’t cause problems until a recently approved blog (which apparently has some awful markup) broke things. I’ve fixed the issue; but, you’re likely to see an overwhelming number of blog posts at the moment (sorry about that). In the (hopefully near) future there will be a better way of reading blogs (probably something like a reading list and custom feeds per user).

(more technical details about the problem are after the cut…)

The problem was due to invalid XML entities being included in posts. The solution was to wrap anything that’s come from blogs in <![CDATA[...]]>. More information about that for the curious can be found at w3schools.