I’ve made a few behind the scenes updates to FIRST Blogs that make how updating of blogs is done more efficient. Amongst the changes are upgrading to a newer version of Magpie and changing some reporting things. In case anyone’s curious there’s been over 23,000 update cycles since FIRST Blogs started.
I’ve just completed an update to the FIRST Blogs homepage. With this latest update come some internal changes to how the tag cloud is generated (which will hopefully require less manual tweaking to maintain than the previous version) and the addition of a “Recent Additions” section which shows the three blogs most recently approved by the moderation staff (updates to existing listings won’t bump you onto the Recent Additions page). The idea for this actually came from one of the sites that was linked to in an AdSense ad. So, that’s pretty cool and unexpected.
The server running (amongst many other things) demo.openFIRST.org, FIRST Blogs, FIRSTcast and Bugzilla.openFIRST.org has undergone updates. It’s now running a newer version of PHP 5 (5.0.5) with exif and Flash compiled in now and MySQL 4.1.14 (previously it was running the 4.0 series). So, if anyone was looking for newer stuff it’s ready now and if you experience any problems with this site please let me know.