BlogDogIt

Sorry to our users who have logged-in using facebook authentication in the past and can no longer do so now. A "security enhancement" by facebook no longer allows log-ins to websites that do not use an encrypted connection (such as BlogDogIt.) We find this a bit ridiculous since the whole point of OAuth (authentication) is to provide an encrypted method to verify credentials... oh, well. That's progress.

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It has long been my intent to continue running BlogDogIt.com on the Geeklog CMS platform; doing my best to utilize existing features and plug-ins to keep this place on the cutting edge. Not too long ago though, I waxed poetic over my wishing to do something with the platform that - to my knowledge - had never been done with Geeklog. (See:Getting Geeky With IT)

I am pleased to report that after having submitted my work to Geeklog.net, I was informed by them that my modification - which I have named "RSS Last Post" -  has been accepted and added to their official downloads section under the heading "Add-ons" subcategory "Hacks."

Get only the latest post from your favorite blogs.
Display in side block or static page.

A great deal of my blogging efforts revolve around promoting others' blogs. For many years I would use the Geeklog Portal Blocks to share their RSS feeds. I soon got the idea to attempt to extract a remote site's latest post and feature it in a static page or block and set about cobbling together this hack. In addition to showing the last post for the blog it also gets the website's logo and link if supplied to their feed (some do, some don't.)

Click the image above to visit the RSS Last Post download page and download the ZIP file - chocked full of tasty PHP Soup. Look around BlogDogIt for several examples of this hack in action.

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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