The only good thing about being sick is that it gives me carte blanche to lie on the couch and blogsurf.
Was playing around on Allconsuming, which led me to Jill Walker's blog. She's working on her doctorate at the University of Bergen (Norway), and has some great papers on her site related to blogging. Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool is good. Even better is a paper she presented at the June 2002 ACM Hypertext conference, called Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web. The abstract for the latter is short and sweet:
Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective, peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power, affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web.
Jill also has a link to a post on "nomadic writing" written by her friend (and "blog cluster" neighbor) Adrian Miles.
My blogroll is taking over my life.
Which is one of the "problems" with www.blogroller.com. You're not actually linking to the sites on your blog roll in a google readable way. You have to use php or write a server side include script (which my team did for me) if you want google to know who your friends are. ;-)
Hmmmmm.....hadn't thought about that. A php include seems like a good idea. But if I switch my pages to .php, will existing links that others have to the .html versions still work? SSI might be a better idea, if I can override server settings with .htaccess to allow .html files to be parsed. Need to check.
Meanwhile, I may switch to blogrolling on my PHP-based links page, and simple HTML on my blog--at least until I come up with an appropriate solution. Thanks for the heads-up.
Here's what we did:
--cgi code--
#!/bin/sh
URL=http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display_raw.php?r=some number
echo "Content-Type: text/html"
echo
/usr/bin/GET $URL
--end code--
If you don't have GET(/usr/bin/GET or /usr/local/bin/GET),
you can use wget or curl.
add the following to the template
Oops. Try this again... add the following to the template...
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/some cgi-->
Woohoo! It worked. Took a little work, as I had to use curl, and also had to add an .htaccess file with an AddHandler for parsing .html files. (Happily, our sysadmin hadn't turned that off for users.)
Life is good. The blogroll is user-friendly, and I now have an *excellent* cgi and ssi exercise for my class to use next quarter in my blog-centric web design class. :-)
Thanks, Joi!