Friday, August 13, 2010

Geobulletin - News from the Geoblogosphere

The last days I have worked on the new version of Geoblogosphere News which has several new and nice functions:

  • First, I always found it a bit painful to type the long geoblog-stratzigraphy.net URL, so I decided to give the tool an own domain. Because every nice domain name containing geoblog etc. seems to be already sold, I bought geobulletin.org which is now the new home for Geoblogosphere News. Therefore Geoblogosphere News is now:

    Geobulletin: News from the Geoblogosphere
  • The pages are now completely redesigned and I hope you like the new design..
  • As the new LOGIN link indicates there are some new community functions. Those of you who have an OpenID (e.g. blogger or wordpress URL) can login without registration and can start playing with geobulletin.
  • OpenID URLs are also used to verify a blog's owner and I plan to give you more possibilities to change the metadata of your blog.
  • After login you can choose 'favorite' blog posts by clicking on a little heart icon shown after each post. These favorites are used to generate a RSS feed which you can in turn use to include it in your blogging environment.
  • There is a -still experimental- DOSSIER section which can be used to give excellent posts on some 'hot topics' an own section.
    I have created 6 main categories, but this structure can be changed of course..
  • I will not show google ads any more. The 2 $ monthly didn't even cover Geoblogosphere News' hosting costs ;)
  • Well and there has been many, many code cleanups and changes etc, I therefore assume geobulletin will be a bit buggy. This is why I have added the small red 'alpha' to the headline.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the new version!

However, I have some small suggestions:

A per language feed would be nice; or even multi-language (e.g. all English and German posts).

Similarily, is it possible to collect blogs (not only posts) in the Favorites?

And how do I manage to get get this little picture for my posts?

Thanks!

Robert Huber said...

Hi effjot!

Language feed are already working but still 'hidden'.. To subscribe to a language specific feed you have add a language parameter such as lang=DE to the feed url for example: http://www.geobulletin.org/feed.php?format=atom&lang=DE

Adding complete blogs to favorites is a good idea, I will add this feature to the next update.

Pictures are added if they are explicitely listed in you blogs feed. Normally this is the first picture of a blog post.

Thank you for the suggestions!
Robert

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the language hint!

Regarding pictures: is there anything special needed for my feed? Pictures do appear in feed readers and even Facebook (whose blog import otherwise sucks like a perfect vacuum), so I obviously need to change something in my Wordpress RSS.

Anonymous said...

I've now found out how to make pictures appear on Geobulletin.org from a Wordpress blog.

When inserting an image, at the very bottom of the dialog, you can select “use as featured image”. (I've always overlooked this option, because I didn't scroll down that far…)