The Challenge

Rambles and Riff Raff about all this and that

Aggregating - Part 2

Published by Esteban Glas on May 27th, 2008 | This post lacks all category except for: Betas, Blogs, Business, Lenovo, Olympic Marketing, Social Media, Web 2.0, Web Marketing

So, the challenge was to build an aggregator that could display the life lessons I mentioned on part 1.

When faced with the white canvas I could of done anything. Search for a CMS, build something from scratch ar whatever crossed my deviated mind.

I went with the best platform I know. Wordpress. Mainly thanks to me finding a beautiful RSS parsing library called SimplePie. That library enabled me to do whatever I wanted with the feeds. And so I did.

Building a feed reader within WordPress was fun.

First I went for a “live” approach. I just fetched the feeds and presented them. But that proved to be slow and unreliable.

Thus I made the choice to save everything into the DB. That allows me to sort, change, and adapt the content while boosting the performance quite visibly. And there’s quite some processing that needs to be done.

For starters the greatest challenge was to make things somewhat usable for the visitors. With over a 100 people aggregating to a single page we had to provide a simple way to sort and find whatever is of interest.

The Solution? Creating filters. If you go into the “Voices” page you’ll see 3 dynamic dropdowns (Country, Language and Sport) that allow to get just the content that you are interested in. The same logic will apply, in the near future, to an aggregated feed.

There was quite some degree of learning on the process. For starters I found out that blogspot’s feeds are full of rubbish. Also I reinforced the Old Addagio: “IE 6 sucks”. I truly believe that that particular browser is the accounts for way too many extra development hours (as the need to “hack” stuff to make it work correctly is a must if you want to build anything somewhat “modern”) and a lot of wasted bandwidth.

Also making anything non-that-conventional requires intensive cross-browser testing. Here’s a sample of my 3 ThinkPads showing the page on various OSs and Browsers:

(Left to right: Firefox [top] and Konkeror [bottom] under Linux; Opera [left] and IE7 [right] under Windows; Firefox [left] and Safari [right] under Windows. No I don’t own a Mac, thank you very much).

I hope you enjoy reading this guys posts and stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come.

With some luck I’ll leverage part of this efforts and build it into plugins that people can use on their own blogs. (Chances are this wont happen before the end of the games).

PS: In case you wondered why I haven’t posted much lately: this is the reason.

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