After many days of procrastination, I finally got down to doing a revamp of the blog aggregator that we run at bloggers.pk. Barely two months back in early December I quit on the ever faithful wordpress CMS system simply because it was not designed to be an efficient aggregator. I moved away from WordPress and into PlanetPlanet the perfect system to run a blog aggregator. The only problem with it is that you need a little time and effort to configure and bring it into a full jog, especially for a person like myself it meant to learn and dabble in the coding language HTML::Template.
Bloggers Pakistan was basically an effort to provide one concise place to display updated posts appearing in the Pakistani blogosphere it was also a great tool to monitor all blogspot.com hosted sites as with the Blogspot ban it was cumbersome to visit a blog and discover its not been updated. All said it might have even projected some good bloggers to be exposed to a wider variety of people surfing the blogosphere.
The present theme employed at the blog aggregator was one selected after much consideration from the Open Web Design website made by Gerhard Wolfgang. To customize the theme and incorporate it into the HTML::Template language took a little hard work as generally one was unable to visualize the outcome without having it uploaded on to the server and run the planet engine through it everytime we made even the slightest change. The learning curve for HTML::Template was not bad, I now have a decent idea of the stuff being used in the aggregator but if someone was to ask me to solve another problem, I might simply look into his eye with a blank face almost as if to say ‘What the heck?, come again!!!!’ Simply said I learnt what I needed to learn and there you have it.
I get the feeling blog aggregators should become popular with time, the more and more people start opening blogs worldwide it would become progressively difficult to monitor everything and hope to remain on top of the topic of interest so blog aggregators can provide every one with one concise location to read everything. This weekend I have definitely had more appreciation for the overall concept and may have an idea or so for another blog aggregator (on a global level), but if you have an idea for a blog aggregator then drop me an email, maybe we can work something out.
Comments
9 responses to “Bloggers Pakistan gets a Face-lift”
When we first launched Bloggers.Pakistan, I had no idea we’d be facing such face-lift issues so late in the game. But I bow before your technical know-how in making this theme work so well…
BP looks young and refreshed…like a hollywood wife who just got a new face lift and a boob job..LOL!
Asalamu Alaikum Wa Rahmatullah
Well done, Dr. Sahab.
Was Salam
dr saab good theme but it still have feeds fetching issue as it still has not fetched my feed yet 😀
Looks a lot better now.
Much better than the previous bland look.
Nie job done there.
I am not sure if its a genuine problem but at least its quite genuine for me. I am using feedreader 3 to have feeds from Bloggers Pakistan and my greatest problem is…. yes of course traffic. Is there anything I can do to filter the blogs that I don’t want to read? Do you already categorize/ classify them somehow?
yess
plz visit http://www.pkhope.com