What is a Network Hub For?
I’ve been considering the role of a hub blog at the heart of a blog network for a while for obvious reasons. In our strange nautical way we call Syntagma the flagship of the network, and so it is. But what are the features needed on the flagship of a large fleet of blogs of the line?
Barry Bell over at Blogging.Wurk.net has provided a neat feature list:
* a full network-wide search that covers both the core network blogs, and the independent network blogs.
* a main blog that provides network news and content roundups.
* featured network content and a ‘river of content’ aggregated from across the entire network.
* a categorised directory listing of all blogs in the network.
* a detailed page for each network blog.
Maybe Barry was inspired by the BBC’s new network hub for its growing accumulation of blogs by its journalists. One of the highlights is a super-feed of posts providing a river of opinion and news, a concept that’s at the heart of RSS, at least according to its pioneer, Dave Winer.
At present we’re scouting round for the kind of technology that will allow such features on this site. Since we don’t use subdomains, the network search facility may be awkward to find. And experience with super-feeds over on WBA has not been very encouraging. Also the detailed page for each blog seems superfluous when a simple link would be a better use of resources.
Our basic aim then, is to keep improving Syntagma incrementally. One problem I’ve noticed is that when WordPress “pages” are introduced, Technorati appears to view the blog as a static website and stops indexing it. I may be wrong on this, but it’s happened twice now on the network.
Any ideas or experiences from readers would be welcome.
John – I commented on this yesterday, however there were a couple of links in there. Did your spam trap nuke it??
By Barry Bell on April 12th, 2006 at 9:50 pm
Barry, thanks for telling me. I’m getting hundreds of spam comments a day. It’s very possible it got nuked. Sorry about that.
By John Evans on April 13th, 2006 at 6:43 am
Y’know, that was probably the single best comment I have ever written, too.
;o))
By Barry Bell on April 13th, 2006 at 9:43 am
Barry, do repeat! Or I’ll have to go scrabbling around on the landfill site to find the old one.
By John Evans on April 13th, 2006 at 9:47 am
But I spent at least 8 hours crafting it. Heh.
Nah… all I said was that a network wide search doesn’t need subdomains to work. I’ve integrated a major search engine’s Search API into the hub, so as long as you’re indexed by them (which we are) then it works fine, and is probably more powerful than something home made.
As for the ‘river of news’, I built my own aggregator out of SimplePie.org, some sticky tape, and some old yoghurt pots. I don’t publish a feed for it (I could do fairly easily) because I’m not sure how useful that would be to anyone – it’s more a visual snapshot of the kind of content that’s spread across the network at any one moment in time.
The individual detail pages for each blog may be superfluous, but on the other hand, I believe they give a little weight and authority to the hub site, and give people a more cohesive idea of what the network is all about, rather than sending them off to all kinds of blogs with all kinds of different designs and styles, etc. It takes away one of the confusion factors for people who are new to blogging.
Oh, and that river of news thing’s been up there for a good 2 or 3 months now – maybe I inspired the BBC?
;o))
By Barry Bell on April 13th, 2006 at 10:12 am
Thanks for the 8 hours of your time, Barry. I can see you’re a Heath Robinson man, or should that be Blue Peter?
Yes, good suggestions. From what you say, I’m guessing the search engine API is Technorati’s, which seems to be ignoring us now for daring to use static page.
Anyway, as my mother used to say, what we can’t fix up, we’ll do without.
By John Evans on April 13th, 2006 at 10:30 am
Nope, not Technorati. ;o)
Heath Robinson? A little before my time. I’m more of a ‘Why Don’t You?’ man, myself.
By Barry Bell on April 13th, 2006 at 10:35 am