Sidebar Changes

Mom has given me access to the layout of the blog to upgrade the feeds from family blogs. I've added the Recent Entries on Family Blogs feed to the sidebar. This feed shows the five (limited by Blogger, not me) family blogs that were most recently updated. I've been a little creative in the naming of each link. I wanted to include the blog authors name and the title of their recent post, but I didn't want to ignore the title of thier blog. Please let me know if you have any feedback on this format.

[Update: 6 May 2006] It looks like the Recent Entries Feed is not being updated accurately. The problem seems to lie in getting the list of family blogs from my bloglines account. I'll have to look into a better way to make it work.

[Update: 8 May 2006] I changed from using my bloglines account directly to using a file I copied from it to another website. The part that parses the list seems to work more reliably, but Yahoo Pipes still cant seem to get it all the way through the pipeline reliably (uses 4 pipes to get the feed the way I want it. It looks like the only way to do it reliably einough is to get a server where I can run custom code but I'm not ready to commit to paid hosting.

[Update: 10 May 2007] It looks like the best way to make this work is to manually enter the blogs to monitor in Yahoo! Pipes. It makes the pipeline much more simple, but it will be slightly more work to update when a new blog needs to be added or a blog moves to a new blog site.

[Update: 13 May 2007] While the feed I created for this feature was limited to one entry per external blog, Blogger was remembering old items that had been in the feed and continuing to display them. I think I have fixed this by setting the ID of the feed item to the full domain name of the blog, So instead of a new entry on an external blog being a new entry in the feed, it is now an update to an existing entry of the feed. Let's see if this works.

[Update: 16 May 2007] It finally seems to be working. I had to associate and ID with the position in the feed because Blogger doesn't seem to want to reorder items that it has previously include. The sidebar listing also has a conciderable delay from the live posting because of caching of the data by both Yahoo Pipes and blogger. Unfortunately Yahoo Pipes cache for infrequently updated feeds seems to be quite long.