Oregon Blogs Aggregator Goes Live

Wow, you people move fast! I guess we should expect that if there’s a story to break, bloggers are going to be there before anyone!

Yes, Virginia, there is an Oregon Blogs aggregator. But it’s time for some pause before swamping the poor fellow’s server.

Backstory

Earlier today, I was emailed by Kyle Ritter of Barfly Magazine, who said that he’d taken Paul Bausch’s XML data and created a simple aggregator based on some other work he’d done. Then, after putting it up and registering a somewhat comical address (ignoregon, which I think is just hillarious) he decided to see if anyone else was doing anything.

Then, having discovered that there was indeed an effort to restore ORBlogs to even more than its original glory, he contacted me to ask about the status, and what steps he should take in order to not dillute or derail the current effort- if there truly was one.

All in all, it was a very thoughtful message, and I tried to reply in kind. Telling him that there was indeed an effort, that we had a functional and robust platform on which to build- and that we merely needed to get it on a server, work out a few bugs- and dump the database.

I discussed that, originally, our plan was to get something up immediately, and then design what we wanted- but that Patrick Lightbody’s code was basically everything we wanted anyway (categorization, Digg-style ranking, etc.) so the goal was to go live by October 1st (This was all something I was working on when a family death and some other home casualties derailed my deadline, by the way- I’m not ignoring you ORBlogs, honest!).

I then suggested that we talk ASAP. Mainly this was because I’ve been in a situation where I’ve done alot of work that was basically thrown out (that sucks, lemme tell ya) and wanted to personally recognize and thank him. But also- and more importantly- I thought that this could be a way to have something basic up and running that the blog community could use immediately, while we work on getting the more advanced code working- given my delay.

Frontstory

But, neither Kyle nor I recognized the blogger’s love of The Story (or at least the Blogger’s tendancy to… well… blog).

It seems that Jack Bogdanski came home and casually (not- as he notes- obsessively) checked his logs and noted the hit from Kyle’s aggregator and immediately wrote a blog post about it, setting off a flurry of activity.

So, now Kyle’s server is live with blog posts, but this is time for some pause for a couple reasons- not the least is that we don’t want to crush Kyle’s server

Kyle, did you know that Paul Bausch was seeing about 1300 page views per day? That’s one of the issues Louis and Clark was going to help us with. Hope you have bandwidth!

The Rest of The Story

So, the question is how do we proceed. My idea was that, assuming it can take both the traffic and the abuse, Kyle’s site be something Oregon Bloggers are immediately able to use, and we- still as quickly as possible- get Patrick’s code running. This will do a number of things:

1. Give Oregon Bloggers something to use immediately.
2. Give Kyle a name- since he is the man.
3. Give the ORBlogs team an idea of load, desires, needs, etc. earlier than we’d otherwise have it.

Kyle’s happy to provide the bandwidth (assuming it’s not too much) and supports us using Ignoregon until the new code is bug free and live.

What do you think bloggers? Leave your comments here or head over to the Google Groups page for input. Until then, check out Ignoregon, and send Kyle a message- without knowing anything was going on, he got a basic site up and running. One more great person working for the benefit of ORBlogs.

Thanks Kyle!