Pie Palace

As alluded to last week, Blogawa is undergoing a reskinning. The new site will be pretty much the same in terms of functionality, except that it should look a bit nicer. The only major change will be the use of Gravatars to provide avatars for authors.

The URL for the RSS feed will change. I should be able to set up a forward to send your RSS reader to the appropriate place, but I may not. So if you find that your feed reader breaks, come back to blogawa and resubscribe.

Aaaany day now…

Blogawa is ugly. Ugly, ugly, ugly. So I’m redesigning the look. As part of the redesign, I’m putting together a wordmark that will be shown on the mast head. Here are some of the possibilities:

(The source HTML is available as well)

What are your thoughts? Suggestions? Constructive criticism?

Triple Beaver winning (and donut eating) blogger Zoom has joined Blogawa! If you would like to join Blogawa, fill out an application.

No. I’m not pregnant. But seeing blogawa grow makes me feel like the owner of an ugly dog that nobody likes. Sure, it’s ugly, but sometimes it does something nice, that makes the snickers worth it. In this case, blogawa has sprouted a pair of new contributors: A. and J. of Please Pick-up Your Socks.

I’ve added two new contributors to Blogawa: Jen Gilbert and Transit Ottawa. Welcome aboard! If you want to get your blog added to Blogawa, hit the add form.

I’ve added Images of Centretown to Blogawa.ca. Centertowner has lots of pretty pics of the core of our fair city.

I have to offer an apology at this point as well – I’ve been taking most of August away from my computer, so I didn’t add IoC to Blogawa in a timely manner. I asked Centertowner on August 9 if he wanted to join our blogging community, but didn’t actually add him until today.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to remove Standard Issue from the Blogawa blog roll.

Blogawa.ca is now reposting for XUP and Coloured Marbles.

piepalace and blogawa have been down on and off for the past few days. Piepalace has been smacked with thousands of hits (more than 44,000 today alone), and has goosed up its load much higher than usual. Dreamhost has been shutting us down for excessive load. I’d originally thought that I was being DoS’d but the traffic looks reasonable: valid urls, different agents, spread across a wide range of IPs. Hopefully the load will stay reasonable over the next little while. Although I probable should install wp_cache.

Blogawa.ca has two new contributors: OCInfo, a website about OC Transpo and it’s forays into the online world; and Real Grouchy, a blog that makes my curmudgeonliness look like an affectation (and follows swap boxes).

On Friday I spent a couple of hours combing Ottawa blogs to invite new contributors to the Blogawa fold. Sadly, my response rate is abysmal. For every three invitations I send, I get one response.

Are there any blogs you would like to see added to Blogawa’s blogroll? If so, please leave a comment on this post.

I’d like to switch blogawa.ca to use more standard aggregation software (a) so that I don’t have to maintain the codebase, and (b) so that I can add microformat parsing to the aggregator so that other planet sites will be able to detect microformatted postings.

There only seem to be two popular planet implementations: Planet Planet which is written in python, features 9,503 loc and output generated by a templating engine; the other implementation is planet-php which is written in PHP, with 608 loc (plus 1202 lines of XSL, ugh), and features output generated by XSL.

Given my aversion to templating engines, my dislike of XSL, I seem to be stuck. I either bite a bullet, or I keep up the opensource tradition of forking, splitting, and generally reinventing the wheel. =(