In a continuing effort to create one single place where all Show 'n Tell Thursday posts can be easily found without forcing anyone to adopt any particular conventions, make any special changes to their site, use any particular tagging scheme, etc., I've added some new functionality to my Domino-based bloggregator template. The new feature allows me to pull in posts from one feed and yet associate them with the original authors' information. This allows me to pull in tag feeds from Technorati, which means that those of you who don't have the capability or who haven't set up category feeds for your SnTT posts can now be included in the aggregator simply by generating the technorati tag. Since there's still a lot of inconsistency in tag usage amongst contributors, and I'm going to stay neutral on any questions about what the "best" way of handling SnTT are, I'm pulling in three different feeds: Show-n-Tell Thursday, Show 'n Tell Thursday, and SnTT. Duplicate entries are avoided by matching up permalink URLs.

If your name is not appearing in the "Select a Feed" drop-down and you do want it there, you are welcome to register your information. If you don't have a categorized feed but you are using Technorati tags, just leave the Home URL and Feed URL fields blank, but be sure to enter the Primary Blog Home and Primary Feed URL data so that my code can match your posts in the Technorati feeds.

This is still a little bit hit-or-miss, because it is sensitive to minor differences in URL formatting. (I.e., if I've got your blog registered as "http://www.dominoFreak.com/a5567b/blog.nsf" and the feed comes in with items pointing to "http://DominoFreak.com/A5567B/Blog.nsf", my code isn't going to match things up properly. I'll eventually get around to adding case-insensitivity (which will be easy) and "www." insensitivity (also easy), and I'll also probably also have to deal with spaces and % sequences and all that... But what I've got for now is good enough. If I don't find your feed, either because you haven't registered your blog with the aggregator, or because of a mismatch in your registered information and what comes in the Technorati feed, I'll just associate your post with the Technorati page instead of with you. This will result in a duplicate entry in the aggregator if you've got a categorized feed and you are also tagging your posts (but only if there's a mismatch in the URL formats).

Permanent hosting is still not resolved, but you can still get to the aggregator here and you can subscribe to the consolidated SnTT feed that it generates here.

Now that this feature has been added, I'm also finally ready to contribute the code to openNTF, so I'll start looking at license models, adding a few more comments to the code and writing up a user/admin manual.

1. Martin Vereecken12/21/2007 04:10:15 AM
Homepage: http://www.bizzybee.be

Hi Richard,
I'm new to SNTT. I posted my first article 2 days ago, but it won't appear. Can you somehow/somewhere see what went wrong? Or can you tell me who to contact for this? Thanks!
Regards,
Martin