Pie Palace

Blogawa.ca now has three new contributors: our geeky pals at Zone 12, the highly fashionable Dare to Unravel, and the contentariffic Hello Ottawa. ((blogawa++)++)++

For some of us, making it big is getting cross posted to the Make blog. By that measure, the folks on Ottawa’s Zone 12 Project blog have made it with Nigel Vezeau’s fantastic child-size recumbent trike. (And yes, I’ve asked them if they’d be willing to have Z12 added to Blogawa)

For the past couple of weeks, Blogawa has been misbehaving. It’s been quietly ignoring posts from Perspective Ottawa. I use FeedWordPress to aggregate posts from around town, so this weekend I looked into it a little more seriously.

After I upgraded to the latest FeedWordPress, I started seeing errors like:

WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 48,382 bytes received

when I manually refreshed Perspective Ottawa’s feed. With a bit of digging, I discovered that there’s a default timeout of 10 seconds in the library FWP uses to download and parse RSS feeds. I’ve pinged the author about it, but in case you’re having a similar problem, here’s my fix:

1. Edit your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php.
2. Search for function fetch. You should find the function near line 1407 (for FWP version 2010.0905).
3. Under the line $feed = new SimplePie();, add: $feed->set_timeout(25);.
4. When you’re done, your code should look something like:
   
5. Go to your blog’s Syndication admin page, and update your feeds. If you get PHP syntax errors, you made a mistake.

With that fix, FeedWordPress and I are now BFFs again.

I’d like to welcome a bunch of new bloggers to Blogawa! In chronological order:

First among equals is GJ Hagenaars‘ now ex-campaign blog. He’s no longer in the Bay Ward municipal race for all the right reasons. It sounds like he intends to keep his blog updated with his thoughts on the future of our city.

Keeping in the electoral vein is Municipalities Out Of Control – sort of a Girls Gone Wild for city politics, but with finances instead of sex and city councillors instead of drunk/stoned/payed teenagers. (Mr. O’Malley, I apologize if you don’t like the simile, but the name of the blog was too good to pass up)¹

Blogawa also welcomes its first online magazine, in the form of UnFolding. The whole thing looks pretty snazzy, particularly the previews section.

iKEN is an excellent photoblog by a Korean exchange student visiting Ottawa. The photos of Korea are particularly cool.

We also get to welcome ThumbShift a cycling blog. Fellow cyclists are always welcome, especially those who post pictures of street art.

1. Mr. Francis, you really don’t deserve this simile. Best of luck on your legal battles. I encourage you to consider joining a religion. Like Scientology. (back)

Blogawa welcomes TheatreGirl to its fold. TheatreGirl is writing reviews of Ottawa’s theatre shows. She promises to be keeping an eye on the Fringe – which I’m looking forward to. I refuse to have any experience unless I’m told beforehand that it will be good.

Observent readers of Blogawa will notice that I’ve added El Maks (of swapbox fame) to Blogawa. El Maks, (no relation to the awesomeness of Maki), is, well, awesome.

As always, suggestions for new blogs can be made to erigami@piepalace.ca.

I’m back. My wrists aren’t 100%, but they’re much better than they were. To prove it, I’ve squeezed another feature into Blogawa: events. Our friendly events robot reads OttawaEvents.org daily, randomly picks some upcoming events, and posts them to Blogawa.

The events are currently jumbled together, regardless of category, but that may change with time.

The Slaughter Daughters (née Bytowne Blackhearts) have joined Blogawa. Welcome aboard ladies.

And what do you mean there isn’t a league game until May 30? Awww…

Phew. The upgrade worked. I’ve redirected the old feed URL to the new URL, and everything should be smurfy on Blogawa itself.

Of note:

• Comment links should now work (thanks MG).
• We’re now displaying 25 posts/page (thanks RG).
• Updates should occur much more often now. If I’m hitting your blog too often, let me know.
• If you’re an author, and you want your gravatar to show up, email erigami@piepalace.ca and let me know.

As far as I know, all of the feeds imported properly. Let me know if there’s anything amiss.

Blogawa will be down briefly for the reskinning. Stay tuned… (I have the power. But do I have the grace?)