About the Site...
I've had this domain for a while, and while PlantetGeospatial was running in "Lite" mode, I decided to fill the gap
by creating a central aggregator for all ESRI Developer related blogs. These are all public blogs, and if you
want your blog added/dropped, just drop me an emailemail.
Blog Roller
This site is based on the JRN Blog Roller project that's hosted over at CodePlex.com.
This gave me the foundation of the roller itself.
At it's 0.3 release, the blog configuration was a semi-colon delimited list
stored in the web.config file. Since this was kinda kludgy, I grabbed an OPML parser from Bruno 'Shine' Figueiredo's site
http://www.brunofigueiredo.com . By folding these two together, I'm able to
manage the blog list as OPML, and still leverage the bulk of JRN.
I also stumbed onto XlDataProvider and found out just how easy it is to work with Xml files in ASP.NET. The blog
list is literally 5 lines of code... I'm going to post about this since it was just so crazy easy to use.
Source Code
Once I've got things stablized, I'll be posting the source code here.
Caching & Post Shelf-life
I've set the main page to cache for 15 minutes, so that should ease the performance hit when loading the page.
I have not dug deep into the JRN logic related to how long a post stays in the list. Right now, I'm getting the last 2 posts
from the feed. The posts are then date sorted, so things should make sense. The only oddity will be if you post more than 2 items on one day,
then only the first two will appear. If this is a problem, let me know and I'll dig into it.
To Do List
I whipped this together pretty quickly, so there certainly are some things left to button up.
- Better styling of the posts
- Determine if I should show the entire post, or just a snippet
- Create an RSS aggregate feed
- Create a feed burner for the feed
- Simple way to add your blog