Blogug.ch

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: ...

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? ...

Jan Zuppinger contacted me today about a problem they had with the Swiss weblog directory. For a weblog to be nominated for the Swiss Blog Awards it has to be listed in the blog directory. So we currently get many new additions to the list. Great! But one problem surfaced. There are weblogs that don’t have an XML feed (RSS or Atom). But the feed URL was obligatory in the list and I even actively deleted submissions without feed URLs. After all, the list is mainly for the aggregators. Or is it? I currently know of the following services consuming the provided OPML feed: ...

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. ...

Alain Petignat moved the weblog gallery to the blogug.ch domain and updated it. It’s currently not updated automatically, so new weblogs won’t have their picture taken, yet. I took the opportunity and included the thumbnails on the feed directory. See for example the detail page for the local.ch Weblog (and the other ca. 1100 detail pages). Thank you Alain! Stefan provided a nice favicon for the blogug project. I integrated those into “my” two sites (list and stats). Thank you Stefan! On the stats page I did a few detail fixes in the translation. And more important, the blog provider twoday.net is now recognized correctly. They even made it into the Top 5, which currently is: ...

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).