New Blogupdates

It's all about your personal favor. I must say I find the Blogupdates sidebar not to be as nice as it used to be. I'd still would like to see what blog has been updated. The title of the comment is, to me, just extra information.

Comment by localhost at July 2, 2004 04:20 PM | Permalink

The Blogupdates sidebar is using the same principle as the main Blogupdates page.

Listed sorted by blogentries not blogs.

Comment by Henrik Gemal at July 2, 2004 04:28 PM | Permalink

This is real a problem. I usually read 7 to 9 interesting blogs and the sidebar showed me when they were updated. Now, as I only see the entry titles, I have to hover each title in order to see, which blog it is. I think, the entry title is much less interesting than the blog and often not very describing.

I check Blogupdates every day, it's great!

Is there a way to provide a RSS for Blogupdates?

"Instead of listing the blogs sorted by date, it's now sorted by the blog entries date. So all of the entries from the blogs are collected and then sorted by date. This makes the listing more "correct"."

Yes! Now my entries will no longer hog the top spot for hours (remember that bug I wrote you about?). Thanks for fixing this Henrik!

I love BlogUpdates too and the way it's kept "purer" than other Mozilla aggregators.

Comment by Cheah Chu Yeow at July 2, 2004 06:23 PM | Permalink

Looking nice (a little better than the MozillaZine Feedhouse, which in turn is way better than Planet Mozilla). But one question: why isn't the full text of the MozillaZine articles shown? Their feed (http://www.mozillazine.org/atom.xml) has it all included.

The new blogupdate sidebar is a pain when compared to the previous version. No, if some user adds a comment to a mozillazine story, it doesnt make the story a new story. The results are spoiled by these four days old mozillazine threads.
Jumping to the article instead of jumping to the blog where the last article would appear on top also diverts to old articles. Showing the author would also help me.

I use the blogupdates as a sidebar. It's a bit annoying that I not immediately can see who is posting the news.

The long headlines is also a bit annoying. It's much cleaner to have a link to mozillazine.org instead of a link to: Mozilla Downloads Rise Following US-CERT Recommendation to Drop IE

I like the blogupdates Sidebar, but I liked it better before you made the changes.

Comment by Jacob Riis at July 3, 2004 08:37 AM | Permalink

I've been visiting Blogupdates for a while. It was concise, easy to browse, and uniform in presentation. All updates were listed in a table-like format, which was easy to glance over and pick info one might be interested to read further. The new format makes each entry to have different size. As a result, each entry looks like a comment in a discussion thread, which makes one pay extra attention to every entry. Furthermore, now it's not as clear as it used to be from which blog an entry comes. Not to offend anyone, but some Mozilla blogs have greater respect in my opinion and have more insight than others. So to me, the ability to pick those blogs quickly out of the list is really important.

I'd like to ask Henrik, if it can be done, if you can let people to choose the format in which the blogs are presented. The new format would stay as the default, but please provide an option to have the old format turned back on.

Thanks for understanding.

Comment by Walter K at July 3, 2004 10:05 AM | Permalink

> but please provide an option to have the old format turned back on.

This is my favourite tech euphimism: Can I have an option to turn the new behaviour off? Instead of: The new behaviour is bad.

I really like the blogupdates, I have them installed on every machine I work for a very long time. I like it because it works as a nice sidebar component, it is probably as important for me as the spiegel and tinderbox sidebar. But the last revision this was not an improvement for me.

'No[w], if some user adds a comment to a mozillazine story, it doesnt make the story a new story. The results are spoiled by these four days old mozillazine threads.'

Not true. Take a look at their feed (http://www.mozillazine.org/atom.xml) and you'll see that all the articles only carry their original times (the feed is NOT changed whenever someone posts a comment). It's Blogupdates' code that's at fault.

Furthermore, some feeds will never appear correctly, because they don't have the correct time. The server clock for MozillaNews, for example, seems to be about seven hours slow, meaning that their posts appear older than thery are. (I think this is deliberate, so that it looks like they reported on news earlier than MozillaZine). A good solution to this would be for Blogupdates to record the time IT found the article (which would always be accurate to within half-an-hour), not the time that the the (possibly lying) feed says the article was posted.

Oh no! Is there no possibilty to access the old fashioned blog-update??? The new one is really not very clear... Sorry: I don't like it. :-(