Sunday, February 11, 2007
ArcGIS Developer Blog Roller: ArcExperts.net
Posted on Sunday, February 11, 2007 12:45:32 PM (Mountain Standard Time, UTC-07:00)  Comments [0] | 
Categories: .NET | ASP.NET | Blogging | ESRI
Since PlanetGeospatial is running in "Lite" mode, and I had a few hours while my son was napping,  I decided to put up a blog roller that will aggregate ArcGIS / ESRI Developer blogs. I like PlanetGeospatial, but all the Google Earth / Virtual Earth and Island shoreline stuff was a little off-topic for me.



Anyhow - you can play with it over at ArcExperts.net. I grabbed this domain a year or so ago, and it's just been wasting space, so it seemed like a good home for something like this. As usual, this is a free service - any ads which show up are part of the originating RSS feed.

About the code...
The site is ASP.NET 2.0 code, based on the JRN Blog Roller project that's hosted over at CodePlex.com. This gave me the foundation of the roller itself - conveniently packaged as a UserControl that is easily embedded into any page.

At it's current 0.3 release, JRN's blog roll configuration is 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 an OPML file (download here), and still leverage the bulk of JRN (which actually is pretty lean).

I also took this opportunity to play with XmlDataProvider 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 do post about this since it was just so crazy easy to use.

Getting on the Roll...

If you want your blog added to this site, contact me through this site, or over at ArcExperts.net. If your blog is listed, and you want it removed, same thing. Right now it's working with RSS 2.0 feeds and stuff from Feedburner. I'm skeptical if it will parse Blogger.com feeds - if someone wants to have one added, I'll try.

Performance...
I've set things up to cache for 15 minutes, so as long as people hit it occasionally, it should be pretty speedy. I'm still having issues with my hosting, so we'll see how this works out.

Future Additions...
When I have some more time, I'm going to change the main page to background load the feeds via Ajax. From there I'll create a RSS feed from the site, and run that through feedburner.

I'm open to any other ideas, and would love to hear how this works for everyone.

Comments are closed.