From the moment the very first local blog was linked to, Sparkle City Blogs has had a horrible design. I should know: I designed it. The second of the two Spartanburg-specific sites (this one being the other) was launched in late August to be the area’s definitive blogroll, but it has also suffered from a lack of new content, as most of my time and resources have been focused on the Spartanburg Spark.
But, after a conversation about community empowerment with the publisher of the Asheville-based alt-weekly Mountain Xpress on Wednesday, I started rethinking what SparkleCityBlogs.com should be, and how it should work. A reader-friendly redesign was the first step, turning the old bland, thrown-together design into something a bit more updated. The site now looks more modern, and certainly more “designed” than it did. (Big thanks to the creators of the StudioPress WordPress theme, by the way.)
The second step, which is the more exciting one, is the addition of a simple RSS aggregator to the site. Although I’m still working out some of the kinks, the hope is that the site will eventually display excepts of new content from every local blog shortly after a new post goes up. If readers like what they see, clicking on the title will send them directly to the originating page, introducing new readers to the blog.
If it works, SparkleCityBlogs.com will become something truly exciting — the daily source for fresh content by local blogs — rather than a static (or at least irregularly updated) blogroll. It will be a place you could visit daily to see exactly what the latest is from the bloggers in your own community. That’s pretty cool, no matter how you look at it.
That said, there are still a few issues to work out, such as properly identifying local blogs and authors. We’ll be in contact with local bloggers, nudging them towards the direction of Feedburner or some other RSS 2.0 system. Hopefully, these issues will prove to be minor, and we can all benefit from the newly renovated site.
Of course, what good is a new project without testers? If you have a moment, please drop by the SparkleCityBlogs.com and look around a little. Then, if you would, come back to this post and leave your thoughts about what works, what doesn’t, and what you would like to see improved.
Steve Shanafelt
I like the new layout. It should be much more user friendly. Which reminds me. I need to blog!!
Whoops, I found a glitch, or maybe a potential one I guess. I just checked to see if my blog would update on the site, and in showing the pictures I have in my latest blog, one covers up some of the text on the “rarely updated ” list of the site. Fortunately though it doesn’t prevent one from being able to kinda see the links listed nor does it keep you from being able to click on those links that are covered up.
It says “comments off” on mine along with a few other blogs as well, while at the same time it says “leave a comment” for some of the other blog entries. Is there an easy way to remedy that on my end, maybe in my blogs settings? hmmm…
.. Great new look for the site, I’m still clicking on those ads to stir up some google revenue for ya, and hope everyone else is taking the time to do the same. hint, hint, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. (just reminding everyone)
It did break the layout table. Hmmm … I’ll have to see if there’s a way to force images to display properly, and if that fails, to kill images in the feed altogether. Alternately, you could go into your RSS options and set it to display a summary, rather than the full post. I won’t have time to work on it until next week, however.
.. I’ve been trying to find the RSS feed options for livejournal to no avail. If there’s something I’m just overlooking, I’d appreciate a heads up, but I’ll keep trying to find the ‘summarize setting’ for what’s sent to this site.
my comments are set to off too. how can i fix that?
.. I think I fixed it, still the same on the blog site though, so I don’t know.
Sylvie: I disabled all the comments except for in-house ones, as I thought people would prefer that the comments went on their own blogs rather than the Sparkle City Blogs site. It turns out, however, that the comments are actually cross-blog, so I’ve switched the setting. It should take effect with new posts.
chAng: Whatever you did appears to have worked. The table is fine now.