The Knitting Fiend

Ok, this is barely about knitting.

I’ve been working on installing a news aggregator so I can aggregate knitting news and knitting blog feeds at my site. It’s going to be my “super-dooper blog roll” since it lists the first few line of most blogs that publish feeds.

Why did I do this? Beats me. I just wanted to do it. But, now, if someone I like to read publishes a new article, feed, I can see when they update, and I don’t need to visit bloglines or something like that.

I’d like to say it wasn’t difficult to do, but actually, it was a pain in the neck. To avoid hitting other people’s feeds too often, I wanted to cache feeds. That way, my server will only visit look at your feed at most once every two hours instead of every single blasted time someone visits my feed page. (Granted, that will probably be limited to me. And granted, most feeds are shorter than full posts. But still, you never know!)

Unfortunately, I had a_l_o_t of trouble getting things to cache (It should be easy, in fact, “automatic”, but for some reason, I had to run through all suggested optoins for “how” to cache.)

Anyway, if you go here: knitting fiend knit blog aggragator you can see my aggregator in full glory!

Not really so impressive, huh? Still, it may become more glorious in time. Right now, I list the feed I found quickly and easily. Some of my favorite blogs are missing because I couldn’t find a link to a feed. But, I promise you this: if you publish a feed, and I want to find it, I’ll find it!

I’m pretty focused on this feed thing right now, so if there’s a knit blog you think I should add, let me know and I’ll try to add it.