Patrice's Weblog

TL;DR: I’m shutting down list.blogug.ch and stats.blogug.ch, unless you save it by taking over.

Over the past few years I have been maintaining parts of the blogug.ch project, namely the list and the stats. I haven’t done any actual development on those since 2006 but they have been running fine.

From time to time I even confirmed the blogs to make sure they match our community guidelines. But time has been short for that and the list of unconfirmed blogs has been constantly growing with nobody else picking up the slack. This even though a few people have admin access and access is liberally granted. And of course the stats project shows that people just aren’t blogging anymore.

The final straw is that I now had to switch servers once again, as the old hoster proved unreliable.

So all of this combined brings me to the following decision: I will not migrate my blogug.ch projects to the new server and will no longer maintain them.

Please contact me if you want to take over. I’ll give you the full source code and access to the server.

This morning in the train I finally came around to fix a few issues with list.blogug.ch that had prevented a release for a while. The big change: search is now fast!

the search uses a Ferret index with the acts_as_ferret module. Ferret is basically the Ruby version of Lucene.

And the URLs are normalized when a new entry is added. This should leave us with far fewer duplicates than we now have. I find most of the duplicates when checking the new submissions but it still was an annoyance.

Chregu follows Antonio's lead (see monblog.ch and the Swiss feed directory) and now also provides an OPML feed with the active blogs on freeflux.net. This OPML feed is automatically imported to the blog list once a day. Thank you Chregu!

In Chregu's feed all blogs with 10 posts or more and at least one post in the past 30 days are included.

My original call to arms still holds and I will cite it here:

If you are a blog provider in Switzerland or have an easy way to extract only Swiss weblogs, feel free to publish your active weblogs as an OPML feed. It's probably best to follow the format I use for the feed directory OPML. Once you have done that, send me a mail with the feed's URL.

When I create a new Web application I usually try to implement translation right from the start. For example as the Swiss blogosphere has four significant languages, I translated both the blog list and the Swiss weblog statistics. The list is available in English, German and French (thanks to Jérôme for the French translation!) and the Stats are available in German and English so far. I'd like both applications to be translated into more languages. And potentially other future applications as well.

So I'm proposing a simple small "project": a contact point for translators. I want to collect some addresses of people who are willing to provide translations for free - for free applications of course. This would be used only for projects in the Swiss blogosphere (blogug.ch for example or swissblogs.com once that rock starts rolling again).

If you are willing and able to provide translations between German, English, Italian or French (pick two or more ;-) please contact me with a list of your languages and I'll note you. I'll just keep you in my personal address book, so your name and address won't be made public. And I won't spam you, honest!

If you need a translation, also contact me and I will forward your project to everyone who has announced willingness to translate between the required languages.

There is no commitment for the translators. So they can decide every time if they have time for that translation or not.

That's basically a braindump of an idea I just had. So what do you think? Is the idea sensible or complete rubbish?

After my State of the Swiss blogosphere article, Antonio contacted me about his blog platform monblog.ch which is popular in the French part of Switzerland. Basically none of the monblog.ch blog was represented in the feed directory.

I suggested he provide an OPML feed that I can import and so he did. So starting today, monblog.ch weblogs are automatically added if they have at least ten articles, are older than three days and have published an article within the last month. I don't check those conditions myself, but Antonio only corresponding publishes weblogs in the OPML feed.

If you are a blog provider in Switzerland or have an easy way to extract only Swiss weblogs, feel free to publish your active weblogs as an OPML feed. It's probably best to follow the format I use for the feed directory OPML. Once you have done that, send me a mail with the feed's URL.

As I pre-announced in my State of the Swiss Blogosphere article, I created a new Web site to keep track of the numbers in the Swiss blogosphere. The site stats.blogug.ch currently tracks:

• Number of weblogs (total and active)
• Number of posts per day
• Software or platform used

The data for this comes from the weblog list and Planet Switzerland. Additionally historical data has been imported from a blog.ch database dump that Matthias kindly provided.

Have fun with this new application. If you have questions or additional numbers you'd like to keep track of, please tell me. And site translations (French, Italian, Romansh) are of course welcome (contact me if you're interested and I'll tell you how to do it).