New Blog Features

The blogs have changed a bit on LiveModern. While you can still create and write your own blog here, we noticed that so many more people were referencing blogs they've created elsewhere. So we've created a "mashup" of these blogs and published them on LiveModern.

The blogs tab and the blogs portlet now point to these mashed up blog entries, all published here by permission of the authors (thanks to them all!). You can even see a directory of them.

You'll notice that most of the blogs published to date are of home building projects. We're very interested in publishing more of them, so do let us know if you have one or know someone who is authoring a blog. We'd also be interested in publishing blogs that focus on a remodel or renovation project (we'll make a separate topic if there are enough of them).

I hope you enjoy reading the blogs as much as I do. We've just made it a lot more convenient.

Marshall

P.S. If you maintain two blogs, one here and one elsewhere, you only need to do it in once place. just let us know where your other blog is and we'll include it in our feed.

I have a few comments about this. 1. I'm not sure I like how these new blogs seem to have buried the live modern blog content. I suppose that if a local blog gets a new entry it will show up at the top of the list, like it always has. However, if 1 day's worth of entries from every other blog in the known universe is also put in the list we might have to read through 15 or 20 pages just to see if a blog we were following has a new post since we last checked. It's like trying to drink from a firehose. 2. The blog topics page is kind of useless because each of the 5 topics just dumps you into a chronological list of the most recent entries in that category. It looks almost like the main blog page except only the blogs in that topic. However, because there are so many blogs and so many entries, it's just as big a pile as the "all blogs" list. Are the topics the topics of the blog or of the post? I guess categorizing the posts would be harder because that couldn't happen automatically. 3. There really should be two ways to look at these. You already have the "most recent" list that I mention in #2. Although this worked fine when it was just the local content, I think it it doesn't work so well any more. You also need a list of all the actual blogs so we can easily find the ones we want to follow. It would be nice if that list showed the date of the last post in that blog. It seems that many of the new "commercial" blogs have many posts each day, but many of the local blogs are only updated a few times a week if that. 4. I guess the whole point of what you have done here is to make an aggregate "blog of blogs". I can see how this would be usefull. Some of them look interesting and I had no idea most of them even existed. However I don't think it should have replaced the local live modern blog page. [ Ok, after I wrote #3 I found the directory page. That should definately be more prominent. Maybe the blogs tab should go there and have a "new entries" link at the top of that page. Or maybe have two blog tabs, "Blog Directory" and "Blog Feeds" or "Recent Blog Entries" ] Thanks Jamie

By the way, when I clicked on the "livemodern blogs" link in the blog directory page http://livemodern.com/livemodernblogs I got this message: Insufficient Privileges You do not have sufficient privileges to view this page. If you believe you are receiving this message in error, please send an e-mail to webmaster@livemodern.com. I was logged in. Thanks, Jamie

Jamie,

Thanks for your comments. This is a work in progress, so we'll make changes as we go. I have corrected the link above, as well as made it more visible on the blogs page (see bottom of page).

We're also exploring a link in each blog entry that take you to the entires just for that blog. Hopefully we'll have that done this week.

Marshall

I think there are some technical problems with how some of the blog content is displayed on live modern. In the main blog page some of the punctuation marks such as quotes are displayed as their character code. For example, in the latest post "Stucco gets finished" the first line displays: So the final color is “Pediment” by Sherwin Williams on the main blog page, and displays correctly: So the final color is “Pediment” by Sherwin Williams on the page for that entry. Also, in some other entries, some of the flickr html code is displaying as html instead of however it should actually look. It's doing this on the main page and on the pages for the individual blog entries. For example: Crittall Windows from House Beautiful Jamie

Jamie, We are exploring the strange characters, as we've seen them elsewhere. Definitely a translation problem, and we're on it. The flickr code seems to be something you are doing on your blog entry that's a bit out of the ordinary (we've not seen it before). We'll look into it. Marshall

Didn't this page: http://livemodern.com/blogs/livemodernblogs/ used to include the blog name, poster's name, and date on each entry? ******************* Ok, that's weird, I went back to that page after logging in to post this comment and now they are there. Jamie

It appears to be a caching issue. We'll check it out.

Marshall

The blog feed is offline. We introduced content rating yesterday (see top of home page, and a ot of other pages, we're not done yet), and it appears to have broken our feed. It should not be too hard to fix, so we'll get it done as quickly as possible. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Marshall

The blogs are back! The fix was simple to implement, but really hard to find. Ah, the life of a debugger!

MArshall

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