ArchivesBlogs

Every project has it's day. I've administered ArchivesBlogs for four years now. Originally, I created it to fill a void when blogging was new to the archival profession, and archivists were having to make the case for dedicating staff time to shepherding early social media projects. Four years later, things are much different; I'm less interested in Web 2.0 (professionally speaking), more archivists are blogging, and more repositories are maintaining their own blogs. Despite the changes in the archival blogosphere and repository administration, archivists still contact me occasionally and remind me of the value of ArchivesBlogs. It's also lead to some interesting debates in the past. I still think it has its place, but I don't want to be the only person shaping its future. I've also been thinking for a while that I want to get out of the aggregation business, and I believe time to put together a succession plan. The reality is that I don't have the time to rethink what ArchivesBlogs could be, or even give it the care and feeding it needs to keep running.

Thanks to Jeanne from Spellbound Blog, I was made aware of the fact that ArchivesBlogs hadn't really been doing its job. So, I ripped out its guts and put it back together. It's running the latest, shiniest versions of WordPress, FeedWordPress, and Auto Delete Posts, and now it has added Feedburner and WP Stats goodness. Let me know if you discover any peculiarities in the updated set up.

I have no excuses for not updating this blog. I thought about forcing myself to comply some sort of resolution - you know, given the new year and all - but everyone knows how those turn out. Regardless, I have a whole backlog of things to post about, most notably being the countless Python programming projects I've been working on lately. Expect more posts to arise over the next few days as a result of this. Also, I have no excuses for botching up ArchivesBlogs temporarily by mucking about and wiping out some of WordPress's databases that make FeedWordPress, the plugin that grabs content for ArchivesBlogs, do its thing. The recovery was simpler than I thought it would be, but this is probably the largest amount of unplanned downtime we've had. Keep your eyes open, as a replacement for FeedWordpress may itself becoming along sooner or later.

I've updated ArchivesBlogs to the latest version of WordPress, as well as the latest versions of the plugins that do the heavy lifting (FeedWordPress and Auto Delete Posts). In so doing, I found that the database structure of WordPress 2.3 is radically different, causing some of my elegant work to break (namely, the use of the Auto Delete Posts plugin, for which I wrote a patch). You may have seen duplicate posts, no new posts on specific feeds (language and blog type), and possibly other unpredicted outcomes. Everything seems to be working properly now, so if you see anything strange or that doesn't work, let me know.

It was one year ago today that I made ArchivesBlogs available to the public. Time sure seems to fly by fast! Since then there have been a lot of changes - layout, platform, and hosting - but still, I remain involved for the long haul. Thanks to all who provided suggestions, submitted blogs to be syndicated, and any other guidance along the way. ArchivesBlogs now syndicates nearly 100 blogs in 9 languages!

I finally noticed that FeedWordPress, the plugin I use to maintain ArchivesBlogs, has been updated within the last month to work with WordPress 2.1 and higher. I hope to get this working pretty soon, but I apologize in advance if it ends up going down for a few days.

Thanks to the wonderful people at ibiblio, ArchivesBlogs will be changing hosts! If you're not familiar with ibiblio, it's one of the largest and oldest public digital library collections on the Internet. In addition to the upcoming hosting of ArchivesBlogs, ibiblio also hosts librarian.net and Library Web. Pardon any interruptions in access given the impending move; everything should be settled within a few days. Also, a few changes I've made to the backend should fix most of the continuing issues with certain feeds not aggregating. Let me know if there are any problems that still occur.

After many late nights toiling away, I'm done with the latest version of ArchivesBlogs. I've changed things quite a bit - most notably, I've switched platforms from Plagger to Wordpress using the FeedWordpress plugin to do the heavy lifting of syndication. I've decided to do away with the old OPML structure as well since the taxonomy wasn't as refined as I would have liked. Instead, FeedWordpress can categorize posts as they come in, which has allowed me to create a brand new taxonomy for ArchivesBlogs based on language. Each language can also have its own feed now. The one thing missing that I'm really itching to put back in place are the social bookmarking links; none of the plugins I've come across so far seem to like my theme, so I may just end up writing my own plugin. Anyhow, please give me feedback - I'm itching to do more.

After doing some frantic hacking this week I'm happy to announce that I've unveiled the second major revision to ArchivesBlogs. Other than a change in color, I have added the subscription list in the sidebar using a slightly modified version of Dan McTough's Optimal browser for OPML.The OPML file it renders is also the subscription list used by Plagger. Anyhow, let me know what you think. I'm sure there are some kinks that need to be ironed out. I'm off to Library Camp East early tomorrow (a 4:05 AM train out of DC). I hope to write-up a post-mortem soon after.

I had fully earmarked addressing Thomas G. Lannon's "Archive Blogs" post on Documenting Sources, his blog, for over a week now after discovering it in my requisite vanity search of Technorati. Other things (even reading) have kept me busy, though, hence the unintentional neglect. I've had plenty of time to reflect upon it at this point, so I might as well respond to some of his points. He first asks the following: What is an Archive Blog? This should be a crucial question as the growing field of "blogs about archives" offers up posts stretching from the recent SAA conference to South Carolina Gamecocks. Perhaps it would it be helpful to make a distinction between official blogs relating to news and services from archival repositories and personal blogs written by people who happen to work in archives? It is an important question indeed. When I came up with the idea for ArchivesBlogs (and when I was still calling it "Planet Archives"

After two weeks of use, Plagger has proven itself to be pretty resilient. I've been asking myself how I can make ArchivesBlogs even better, and I've finally got a few ideas. A site redesign. I'd like different colors. Categorizing the feeds, e.g. separating blogs by individuals from repository blogs. This will probably end up with me creating a couple of Plagger configurations and dumping them into different subdirectories on ArchivesBlogs. Better support for tags. It'd be nice to pull them out and have automagically linked Technorati tags. Scrubbing HTML from the feeds to create valid XHTML for the syndication page(s). Plagger supports the Perl module HTML::Scrubber so it seems. This is a Big Deal to someone like me. Adding a directory - most likely in OPML - for as many blogs about archives and archivists as possible since it's just not possible to do that for some blogs using Plagger. The most straightforward example are archives with blogs that are part of a library-wide blog and therefore don't have their own feeds.

ArchivesBlogs has been going strong for over a week now. If you use Blogspot and had a blog previously syndicated by ArchivesBlogs, your content may be temporarily unsyndicated. The specific problem is HTTP 502 error, which seems to indicate a problem with a proxy server at Blogspot. In any rate, they should return soon enough -- it would be nice to have the 9 blogs back!

I've upgraded Plagger (the software behind ArchivesBlogs) to the latest version and it's allowed me to add service links to del.icio.us, unalog, digg, Reddit, and Technorati. I suppose I could add more (ma.gnolia, Furl, etc.), but I'll hold off doing that for the sake of cluttering the interface for the time being. If you have any service links you'd like to see, let me know and I might be able to hack something together.

Since my last post about syndicating blogs about archives, I've played around with the idea and different software packages to do it, including Planet and Plagger. I'm happy to announce that after a few days work I was able to put something together. ArchivesBlogs is an aggregator for blogs about archives. It runs Plagger and updates hourly, outputting HTML, RSS, Atom, OPML (for import into other aggregator), and a FOAFroll. The site design is simple, but i'm happy with it. I took whatever archives blogs I knew about and added them, so if you know of any others or you want yours removed, let me know.