Comments on: The feed is gone

By: Writing and Blogging Info » Time-Relevant Widget Needed?

Writing and Blogging Info » Time-Relevant Widget Needed? — Sun, 04 May 2008 14:33:44 +0000

[...] and designer Jeffrey Zeldman recently left an interesting comment in a post where he discusses removing the Ma.gnolia bookmarks feed form his blog. In this [...]

By: Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:48:09 +0000

mario:

The feed can still be viewed in the sidebar of the home page.

It just doesn’t appear in the *body of individual blog posts*, which it only did for a week, anyway.

Thanks!

By: mario

mario — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:06:54 +0000

Please put the Feed BACK!! Tnx

By: Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:50:03 +0000

Peter Urban, thanks for the very kind words, and congratulations on Doorbell!

I understand the commercial (and personal) constraints but I wish there was a little more time to follow our passion.

Yup.

By: Peter Urban

Peter Urban — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:54:33 +0000

Hey man, I’ve been following your site since… gosh think it’s 1996 – first from Germany and now from Canada. I used to love you frequent re-designs and all the struggles that came with them. Especially when I was still coding html and css almost every day. I understand the commercial (and personal) constraints but I wish there was a little more time to follow our passion. Maybe there will be a retired coders club at some point in the future ;-)

By: Jeffrey Zeldman

Jeffrey Zeldman — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:19:34 +0000

Beth:

Thanks for caring. My feed is fine, though: http://www.zeldman.com/rss/

A server issue yesterday may have temporarily prevented the feed from showing up, but it is fine, now. Thanks!

By: Beth

Beth — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 11:59:27 +0000

Besides the Mag.nolia feed, your blog RSS feed appears to be down.

By: cannboys

cannboys — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:35:43 +0000

It’s over 3 years since this design? Feels like no more than 2. I still remember the spaceman and the orange…and when you had a photo of you looking slightly manic, with long hair.

By: Hank Lynch

Hank Lynch — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:27:14 +0000

wow, wish you were using a .Net platform….I could gin this up in a minute for ya. Payback for years of entertainment.

Great idea though, since work blocks twitter, magnolia etc at the firewall, alot of the pages I read just fall apart when rendering. Pain in the A!

By: Hanan Cohen

Hanan Cohen — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 06:08:13 +0000

For me, the important part of your post is:

people would dig up old posts and write comments on them about sites newly added to the Ma.gnolia feed.

When there is a website hosting content from “outside”, it is important to make it very clear to the reader.

For example: I run a site that enables NGOs to open a page about the organization. Often, readers of MY site contact me, the webmaster, about ANOTHER organization that they found in my site.

Since people see only an inch around the mouse arrow, they don’t understand where they are.

By: David Sleight

David Sleight — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 05:20:23 +0000

Gak, you’re right. Apologies. Present conditions have rendered into swiss cheese what was once a glittering pile of crackling synapses. I’d take a crack at it myself if my back-end skills were beyond their current “Wicked Training Wheels” phase.

By: Dan Johnson

Dan Johnson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 03:49:55 +0000

First I must say that my wife and I love the Mr. B Natural short (re: your current ma.gnolia.com links). MST3K has been one of our favorites for years.

As for relating social bookmarks to dates or date ranges, the information seems to be available (posting dates are on your ma.gnolia.com page, as on my del.icio.us page). Now if I could make a nice little PHP script to scrape the data and get it into WordPress… I’ve never created a plugin before. Might be time to try.

By: Jeff Croft

Jeff Croft — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:53:13 +0000

Well, I do exactly that on my site (all of my links come from Ma.gnolia), and I just store them in my database permanently. I query Ma.gnolia’s API every 10 minutes for additions to my bookmarks, pull the data down, and save it in my database.

But, that’s a bit of a heavy solution, because I want to save the data permanently — something lighter might work for you. You could set up a cron job to grab the feed every x number of minutes and save it locally — then include that file in your site, rather than the remote copy from Ma.gnolia. That’s what I’d suggest! :)

By: phil

phil — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:22:10 +0000

I think you should at least put them back in the sidebar. I’ve often found those links to be interesting and informative, and there’s no reason not to include them on the post pages as well as the main page.

I like the idea of being able to gather up a temporally-appropriate selection of feed items per post as well though. As Erik said, it seems like it would be a reasonably simple task to create a local table (feed date/URL/title/description) and then throw an appropriate query at it to pull entries from a preset window either side of the post date.

By: Dan Wilkinson

Dan Wilkinson — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 17:29:36 +0000

I’ve followed your “Outside Reading” links for years. They’re always carefully selected, relevant AND interesting. The color scheme never bothered me, but my eyes are pretty good. I did find the inclusion of the feed within the main posts confusing and distracting, especially since I already followed them on the sidebar.

Whatever you end up doing as far as redesigning/reformatting your site, I hope you do keep some kind of “Outside Reading” list.