Welcome to BlogDogIt Monday, March 18 2024 @ 10:59 PM EDT

Getting Geeky With IT

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BlogDogIt has been running on the Geeklog CMS platform ever since our inception in 2010. While I have many other sites going that run on various platforms it is BlogDogIt.com that gets most of my attention these days in terms of modification / customization. It is the sensible organization of files and functions within Geeklog that makes tinkering around in the code so much fun for those so inclined. Add to that a great group of developers eager to help and you will understand why the thought of moving this website to another platform has never crossed my mind.

As I am sure any frequent visitor of BlogDogIt will attest, we exist mainly to highlight interesting findings from the "web less traveled" and through the years have found many interesting purveyors of content and have made it a point to show appreciation in the form of gratuitous promotion by sharing of content and providing links to these virtual friends of BlogDogIt. On several occasions I have featured the RSS Headline Feed of many of my favored internet sites so that I could stay abreast of activity from this collection of bloggers and content creators. RSS

RSS (Rich Site Summary - also affectionally known as Really Simple Syndication) is a method for making available regularly changing web content. An RSS Feed is a specially formatted file that is created by default by most blogging software platforms and by accessing this file anyone can see a summary of the latest posts without even having to visit the source website proper.

RSSGeeklog CMS comes with a feature known as "Portal Blocks" which allows the webmaster to add an RSS Feed "widget" for any known website by simply entering the URL for that special website summary file. For example, the address for BlogDogIts' Feed File is http://blogdogit.com/backend/BlogDogIt.rss and by using any of several various so called "Feed Readers" a person might follow the posting activities of this website without necessarily visiting us directly.

The "Portal Blocks" feature will typically deliver a list of the headlines for a site, displayed as linking text to each article. I have long wished for the ability to capture only a sites latest post and have it reproduced in a dedicated widget to add this syndicated content directly into the page here at BlogDogIt.

RSSRather than wait, I have begun working on the development of an extension for the Geeklog platform that will allow the creation of a customized widget for featuring the latest content from a selected website. The working title for the project is RSS Tail.

The project is coming along nicely and the results will be exhibited among the left and right columns in the BlogDogIt Topic Area. Using the RSS Aggregator Function hack  as a starting point for the source code I hope to develop this feature into something useful for the many Geeklog aficionados.

If I am featuring your site and you would like that to stop please let me know. If your site is featured and you would like to offer advice on how you would like to be featured we can have that discussion as well. Your own website should offer several configuration options for how your RSS Feed file is created but the actual options are platform dependent. If your RSS is featured here feel free to tweak your RSS settings and see the results by checking right here.

If you would like to see your RSS Feed featured here please let me know and I will see what I can do. If you are interested in obtaining the code for use on your own Geeklog site I will gladly make it available to you on request - that's why it's called Open Source :D

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