700 sailing blogs - now what?

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by Hegemon

What a great idea. Thank you for taking the time and putting in the effort to aggregate information. As a few have suggested tagging and categorizing would be great. Another suggestion would be to add alt text for the thumb nails. Perhaps with a brief description of the channel/blog/facebook page.

Keep up the great work.

Thank you for your comment and suggestions! Alt text will come right up

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by conachair

Might be worth looking into making the home page smaller with less data needing to be downloaded to view - it's a load of data just to load the page, and quite lot of the traffic might come from boats where bandwidth/data cost becomes an issue.

Nice idea though

Yes, good point and I have to optimize that!

[Macblaze]

What controls the thumbnail? Quite a few have generic water shots. Maybe a way for users to change the image? Ot something that updates from each new blog post?

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by Macblaze

What controls the thumbnail? Quite a few have generic water shots. Maybe a way for users to change the image? Ot something that updates from each new blog post?

It actually tries to update the thumbnail for each new post but it isn't going very "deep" into trying to find an image (at least yet).

Here's the logic:

- check RSS/Atom feed and grab picture if specified (usually no picture here)
- check newest post from RSS/Atom feed and grab picture from og:image tag (same that Facebook uses, more often than not this can be found)
- check YouTube channel for latest upload and grab a picture from there (these always have pictures)
- make the newest of the above picture the thumbnail picture

For newer standard wordpress/blogger/youtube sites the picture is more likely to be found

[mglonnro]

New version published with main improvements:

- less bandwidth usage (more speed)
- sites divided into pages with max 100 sites / page
(ty conachair)

- alt text for thumbnails (ty Hegemon)

- a search box
(ty everyone suggesting tags, I will do that, but this is a bit related to that)

[john61ct]

Drupal is a great platform, if you can fit your sites / post feeds into its "node object" structure, they can be re-purposed as "meta blogs" by topic tags, host your own comment discussions, voting / ratings etc.

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by john61ct

Drupal is a great platform, if you can fit your sites / post feeds into its "node object" structure, they can be re-purposed as "meta blogs" by topic tags, host your own comment discussions, voting / ratings etc.

Nice. Will check that out!

[conachair]

Originally Posted by mglonnro

New version published with main improvements:

Works really well now, great work

There goes the morning.......

[simonmorice]

A great project. I did some research last year and recorded some sailing sites into a Google doc. You might find several additional sites.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...tTY91thpz6Is6s

I put the document together to build a paper.li and you might find that a useful approach too: https://paper.li/simon_morice/1496069522#/ - I think I need to find a better method to aggregate feeds.

I hope this is helpful

Regards

Simon

[Perfect Ride]

Wonderful thought to be able to search across blogs for all posts on specific key word.

i.e. posts on a specific location, event or boat part. When searching a keword, it would be great to see post specific relevance across many blogs, or at least relevant posts of the related blogs prioritized under the blog.Relevance would be helped by removal of nav, sidebar and footing info so only post content was included.

Thanks for the effort.

[mglonnro]

Originally Posted by Perfect Ride

Wonderful thought to be able to search across blogs for all posts on specific key word.

i.e. posts on a specific location, event or boat part. When searching a keword, it would be great to see post specific relevance across many blogs, or at least relevant posts of the related blogs prioritized under the blog.Relevance would be helped by removal of nav, sidebar and footing info so only post content was included.

Thanks for the effort.

Thank you for your comment! Feels nice to get the positive feedback

And yes! The search is currently looking through words in the name of the blog, the description (from Facebook tag) and whatever is in the RSS/Atom feed. (So it's not actually scraping/crawling the page as much as just looking at what's in the RSS feed.)

Easiest improvement:

- Sort the sites and blog entries according to simple found/not found relevance
- Sort the sites and blog entries according to some more thought of ranking method (I'm using Algolia for the searches and they seem to have some useful methods.)

More work:

- Index more history from the sites. It would obviously be cool to be able to search the whole history (but on the other hand, Google already exists )

Ridiculous stuff:

- I don't know if YouTube provides any mechanism for indexing videos. There are the titles, of course, but I wonder if YouTube makes the transcriptions available through some API as well.
- I was thinking a lot about geolocation (with all its privacy concerns etc), but maybe people are posting pictures with embedded EXIF information? If they are, then it would be very cool to store the places of the pictures and enable geosearching.

But first things first, I need to write a new blog post of my own before embarking on more coding

[jmh2002]

Thanks a lot for making this. I was wondering if your site could publish an RSS feed or two?

- Firstly a push to RSS feed when a new blog is added to your list

- Secondly, if I understand correctly that you check the various blogs for updates, then maybe a separate RSS feed can publish when there are updates from blogs?

This also might help from a bandwidth point of view, preventing the need to load the whole site.

THANKS again

[Codetrader]

My guess is there hundreds or even a few thousand more bloggers sailing the seas. I'm thinking make it something like this and simple categories:


Circumnavigation

SE Asia
South Pacific
Hawaii
Pacific NW/Alaska
West Coast
Central America/Panama Canal
Caribbean
North Atlantic
Inland Waterway
East Coast
Florida
Europe

ETC
ETC
ETC ETC
Mediterranean
etc
etc


Word will get out and this thing will explode.

[Eagleray]

Great effort and tags would be great - perhaps you can put put in an auto code that adds the main tags as it calculates everything else.
Cheers

[Kintala]

Wow fantastic job. I really can appreciate the amount of work that went into this. Thanks for including us!

Deb
SV Kintala
The Retirement Project