BlogDogIt

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 (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.

Geeklog 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.

Rather 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

Enter your text above - click "say."

Source: http://www.program-o.com/

So I'm on the internet today... minding my own business... no, I mean literally minding my own business; I Googled the word "BlogDogIt." You know, to see if we're getting famous or anything (mainly just seeing what comes up.)

In the process I was pleased to see a search suggestion for "BlogDogIt Reviews" so I said "sure" - I'll be darned - near the top of the results listing was a link to the BigBitingPigProductions.com website featuring the reviews page for their hit film Frances Stein. And lo and behold I see a pull-quote from my review of the film [See: PJ Has Created A Monster] 

I am very honored for BlogDogIt to be represented in this manner and sincerely thank Big Biting Pig Productions for including BlogDogIt in their marketing strategy and commemorate the occasion with this giffy little screen grab: 

Ever since July of 2010 BlogDogIt has been hosted free-of-charge on GoDaddy servers  as part of their "Free hosting with domain purchase" promotion. That service has been discontinued and those servers are being retired. If I do nothing BlogDogIt will simply go away. [smiley:eek]

My first thought was "well, it's been fun but all good things must come to an end..." however, as I looked a little closer I discovered that if I upgraded my paid "Economy Clasic" hosting account (DeBurger.com) to the next tier ("Deluxe") I would be able to host multiple domains from the same account. After careful consideration I have determined that it would be worth the additional $2.00 per month to keep this dream alive...

In order to migrate away from the ill-fated server to the new digs I must first ditch the existing BlogDogIt website lock, stock and barrel (after copying all the files over to DeBurger.com.) It will also be necessary to recreate the databases in their new home as well.

This maneuver is actually nothing new to me and people have paid me to do this for them for longer than BlogDogIt has been around. Still, the thought of killing this site - even in full knowledge of it's ability to be resurrected - causes the heart to beat a bit faster in anticipation of that mad dash to the stated goal.

Good Luck Me...   

So... if this site goes away in the near future it will
be back (or my name is not Philo T. Farnsworth!)

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practicallightning

Only the best blogs. Where blogs come to hang out.

For better than a year now I have been lamenting the fact that technorati dot com has given up on their blog rating system and completely changed the landscape in the blogosphere as far as I'm concerned. There once was a time when your Technorati rating was some indicator of your blogs standing in the community. I would find great sport in perusing the list of registered blogs and would always pay special attention to those blogs with a similar rating to BlogDogIt. Once upon a time I would only "Spotlight" websites that shared a similar Tecnorati score to my site's. Since that system of measure is no more (or NoTechrati, as I now prefer to think of them) the business of discovering new blogs to visit has been a bit more random. Now the house rule regarding a blog's eligibility to be featured here requires that it must be accessible via links originating from BlogDogIt.

A few months ago - following the example of Amanda Wood (Journey of Mixed Emotions, Clearly Writing) - I added the LonelyBlogs "Badge" to BlogDogIt and in so doing have opened a fresh new world of interesting discoveries. As I find the gems I will catalog them in the BlogDogIt Links section so look for more activity in that area too.

LonelyBlogs is basically a feed aggregator of their member blogs. I have personally made several valuable discoveries by visiting the page and selecting sites from their dynamic up-to-the-minute list of freshly published articles. Since joining and having BlogDogIt included in the mix I have noticed a bump in visitors to this site traceable to this initiative. I invite you to check them out and join the fun. Their motto "Only the Best Blogs" would include you, right?
Get started today!

The section below is reprinted from the LonelyBlogs website:

Great News!

BlogDogIt Lands a Pull-Quote!

I am very honored to have the BlogDogIt name attached to promotional items for the Valiant Dead / Karmic Courage production of Ezekiel's Landing. "The Ultimate Home-Brew Sci-Fi Epic" is pulled from my honest review of the work.

https://www.facebook.com/ezekielslanding @EzekielsLanding #indiefilm #SupportIndieFilm

The internet is being overrun with sites offering  you the ability to play that crazy "2048" game. BlogDogIt now has it too!  To make it easy to find I have added a link to it in the top of page menu  (look for "Play 2048") and when you play from that link you will be able to leave comments, so we can keep track of who's kicking whose butt.

Enjoy!

Now I went and did it...

I started a BlogDogIt page on Facebook but that's not the half of it. I modified the code here on BlogDogIt to allow for the posting of any article created here to the new FB Page. (Special thanks to suprsidr for the Post to Facebook Code presented openly on Geeklog.net. After some minor modifications I have a reliable way to feed content to the BlogDogIt facebook community.

This comes hot on the heels of starting my Twitter presence and gets me one more brick in my "Social Media" wall of linky-buttons. So now with a nice round number of social club memberships I figured it was high time I created that show of media links the kids these days are so keen on. That explains the newly added feature block named "BlogDogItly Social".

Featuring the following hip locations:
(each exhibiting various degrees of participatory readiness.)

BlogDogItly Social

https://www.facebook.com/blogdogit

https://twitter.com/blogdogit

http://infinitelyremote.wordpress.com/

http://BlogDogIt.com/backend/BlogDogIt.rss

http://infinitelyremote.blogspot.com/

https://www.youtube.com/user/BlogDogIt/videos/

https://vimeo.com/user19548377/

http://www.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/masodo/

http://www.reddit.com/user/masodo/

http://masodo.tumblr.com/

@BlogDogIt #myfirstTweet

Once upon a time I had a twitter account but just let it go because it seemed all but worthless. I felt most of the 'twits' posts were eminating from the end opposite of the birds tweet producer.

I have very little interest in what anybody (other that myself obviously) is having at mealtime and care even less to be interrupted (during any activity) by the latest memes. However, it is becoming obvious that a great many people are using Twitter as a sensible way to stay up-to-date on a great many aspects of a dynamic internet. It looks as though this may actually prove to be a useful tool for one who "Blogs It" (albeit While Doggin' It.)

As you may be able to see in the image above, I am Following 4 and have 3 Followers, even though at this point "@BlogDogIt hasn't tweeted yet." I owe it to those 3 (and any future Tweetees that I am likely to acquire) to use this newly instituted means of communication in a responsable manner. I sincerely intend to use this service for good and hope this Twitter account will facilitate furthering the goals (stated and otherwise) of BlogDogIt.com.

So I hereby officially invite you to "Follow BlogDogIt on Twitter" and would appreciate your support as I give this thing another "Go."

I am probably one of the greatest proponents for using outdated technologies for all they are worth, but when it comes to Internet Explorer Version 6 there is precious little reason to imagine anybody in their right mind choosing to use that browser.

According to the Internet Explorer 6 page at Wikipedia: 

IE6 SP1 is the last version of Internet Explorer available for Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, Windows Me, and Windows 2000. Internet Explorer 6 was superseded by Internet Explorer 7 in October 2006.

I have been noticing in the log files that an inordinate number of hack-attacks are coming from systems that are reporting themselves to be using "MSIE 6" so as of now that browser is being actively blocked by the BlogDogIt firewall; it is no longer welcome. I have a feeling that I will get no complaints and will save much bandwidth for all you cool-cats to use.

Now don't get me wrong, if you have Windows 98SE and you want to take your chances on the internet go right ahead but why not use LYNX Browser or even OPERA has something you can use.

To paraphrase The Oak Ridge Boys - "You don't have to change browsers but you can't browse here."* And believe me when I say, if I'm driving a nail in the coffin of IE6 then you can start diggin' the hole 'cuz this thing is deader'n a door nail.

*"You dont have to go home (but you can't stay here.)"

Here on BlogDogIt the "Spotlight" topic has always been about sharing discoveries I've made while perusing the blog listings over on Technorati [see: Introducing The Spotlight]. Finding quality blogs to shine the spotlight on using this method is getting increasingly more difficult. While I will continue to go on these Techorati fishing excursions from time to time I have decided to modify my technique for finding worthy recipients of the BlogDogIt Spotlight "Honor."

So now, in order for a website to be eligible to be featured in the Spotlight Topic they must be discoverable by following links that begin from this web site. Of course they still have to have that "certain something" that appeals to me and compels me to want to share them with the world.

If you have not explored the previously featured websites in the Spotlight Topic area I encourage you to do so. I would never have featured them had they not shown the potential to be an outstanding, unique and impressive destination worthy of following. If you know of a blog or a website that you would like to see featured in the BlogDogIt Spotlight, add them to the link section here and they suddenly become eligible. I already have several sites in mind so the spotlight is about to get a lot more interesting.

I hope you enjoy this new phase of discovery on BlogDogIt.com - 'Bloggin It While Doggin It' - I know I will [smiley:;)]