Blogroll

So I decided I could bloody well spare an evening to finally get something done I'd been meaning to for about half a year.

The blogroll module for Drupal is something I'd wanted for a while. It was especially needed at the Progressive Blogger Alliance, which is now (in a great part due to my procrastination) a sad mud village filled with spam and people asking to be put on the horribly outdated blogroll.

At least I learned quite a bit in the recent months about developing for Drupal, so it took only a single evening to do what I want.

The Blogroll module uses custom profile fields (I toyed with the thought of supporting nodeprofile, but then decided this was absolute overkill right now). In setting it up, you are able to select a URL profile field that will serve as the blog URL, a text field that will serve as the site title, a URL field that will serve as the feed URL and a checkbox field that will be used to store the state of the site (listed or delisted).

It is recommended that the checkbox be an admin-only field, allowing admins to approve people for the blogroll. The module already has a handy form for this, although with several thousand users, I have to think of something like pagination to avoid pain.

The module provides a blogroll "block" for the sidebar, but that is the least of its features: It can also export them as OPML and Javascript (where the latter works just like Blogrolling.com).

I have installed this prototype on the PBA site and am develop-testing it right now. It's literally fresh from the forge, but if you want to take a look at it, it's here:

http://svn.ermarian.net/drupal/modules/blogroll

It is hosted on a Subversion server, so you can check it out with this command:

svn checkout http://svn.ermarian.net/drupal/modules/blogroll

I'm in the process of updating the blogroll of the Progressive Blogger Alliance, which begins with checking the status of each site and grouping them into categories like "active", "dead", "moved" etc. Thanks to the magic of PHP, this post will show my exact progress with this, as I am entering the status of each site in a neat MySQL table. Here's the breakdown: The total number of blogs is 227. This is the breakdown over status:

Status	Sites
	159
active	23
unreciprocating	11
gone	10
moved	7
dead	6
slow	6
temp_gone	4
titlechange	1

[break] And this is the list of sites, ordered by status:

Status	Site
pending check	OneWomanWreckingCrew
pending check	Mad Kane
pending check	Lucky White Girl
pending check	LOSLI
pending check	Logical Voice
pending check	Life in the Third Layer
pending check	anonyMoses
pending check	Another Liberal Blog
pending check	Anti-Zionist Notes
pending check	anti-[everything]
pending check	Antitheton
pending check	Apostate Windbag
pending check	Arancaytar's Little Corner
pending check	Arran's Alley
pending check	at ease
pending check	Atavistic Endeavor
pending check	Bait and Switch President
pending check	Banality Fair
pending check	Madison County Young Democrats
pending check	Maitri's VatulBlog
pending check	Majikthise
pending check	Ohio Liberal
pending check	Off-The-Record, Off-The-Wall
pending check	Odessa Street
pending check	Now Then
pending check	No Religion Now
pending check	NJ Spoken Word
pending check	Nick Lewis
pending check	NewsHog
pending check	Never Knew I was living in the

In summary, Drupal rocks.

A few weeks ago, I said I would work on a Blogroll module for Drupal. This module was supposed to display a list of sites defined by each user in their profile, and be able to export this via JavaScript as well.

The module requires a new custom profile field of the type "url". Optionally, one can also use a custom profile field of the type "textfield" as a site title - this is really recommended, because a list of raw URLs looks just horrible. Thirdly, it is possible to set a custom profile field of the type "checkbox" which then determines whether the site of this user is listed or not. By making the checkbox admin-only, the Blogroll can be administered effectively, allowing only approved sites to be listed.

The source of the module is here. Note that it is my first attempt to use the Drupal API, and if you value your site and server, you shouldn't install it.

But the Javascript works. By a simple addition of this code,

you can syndicate the Blogroll on your own blog, requiring nothing more than the ability to edit the template.

My hope is that if this module can be cleaned up a little, it would finally solve the problem we have at the Progressive Blogger Alliance, where people have been waiting to get their blog listed for a lengthy time.

The last few weeks over at The Progressive Blogger Alliance have been filled with people asking to be put on the Blogroll. The Blogroll - actually one of the first efforts that the PBA grew from, before the network even used a central node based on Drupal software - was discontinued a while back. A mixture of administrative trouble, technical glitches and a rumor that the Google bot may interpret Blogrolls as link farms (and punish the sites' rankings).

The last one I don't know about. If it is true, it might be best to leave it be. But the other two are fairly easily solved.

One problem with the present PBA blogroll is that it uses an external service, Blogrolling.com, whose free accounts are limited and which is not easy to administrate. It is for all purposes impossible to administrate in a group (with shared access and multiple permission levels), which is the philosophy the PBA and Drupal works on.

The solution is obvious: A Drupal module for a blogroll. The links will be fed to it by members - perhaps this could even be meshed with a custom profile field or the Homepage profile field - and the output page will be a Javascript application that prints the links.

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Some extra convenient settings for fine-tuning this blogroll (multiple links, RSS feeds, blocking certain links from certain sites, subgroups that only link amongst themselves to keep the length down, etc) could be added as well.

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Following this rough pipedream of a spec, the next step, naturally, is to see if this has been made before. If it hasn't, well... let's get going! ^_^