Saturday, February 1, 2025

My other blogs, and blogs I read

In addition to this, my main blog, I maintain more specialized blogs -- on the Book of Mormon, the Fourth Gospel, the Tarot, and the works of Whitley Strieber -- which are updated much more irregularly. In the past, it has been my habit to post a notification here whenever anything new was posted to any of those blogs. Now, though, I've changed the right sidebar so that it shows the latest post on each of my other blogs, so you can easily check there to see if there's any new content you haven't read yet. I will therefore no longer be doing "see my other blog" posts.

The list of blogs I read in the sidebar is supposed to work on the same principle -- sorting the blogs according to most recent update and including information about the latest post. This seems to work fairly well, with some exceptions. Francis Berger's and WanderingGondola's blogs appear not to have usable feeds, and so they're unfortunately permanently at the bottom of the list, even though Frank at least posts pretty frequently.

Three other blogs -- Leo's, my brother Luther's, and Richard Arrowsmith's -- have a more puzzling situation: their feeds appear to have arbitrarily stopped updating at some point. It says Leo's last post was a month ago, Luther's was 4 months ago, and Richard's was 11 years ago, even though all three of them have continued to post after those respective points in time. If any of my more tech-inclined readers have any idea what might be causing this or how it might be rectified, do leave a comment.

8 comments:

Francis Berger said...

I don't know what's up with my feed. Everything got messed up after I decided against renewing my domain. I'll see if I can fix the feed.

David Earle said...

If you link directly to the feed URL (https://francis-berger.weebly.com/4/feed) it should work

WanderingGondola said...

Dunno about the blogs of Leo or your brother -- can only guess there's some odd breakage or the feeds aren't automated -- but the subscribe link at the bottom of Arrowsmith's page does include his most recent post.

Yeah, I don't have a feed yet. Need to tinker with TiddlyWiki's implementations, and it seems better to leave that until after migration (I've been offered some dedicated server space; the move will be slow, it's unfamiliar tech-territory for me). I'm wondering if your sidebar gadget tries fetching stuff anyway. Does it refresh on an interval? The view count in my control panel has been jumping by roughly ten per day for a while now, which seems a bit much. Details aren't given so I have no idea who or what is looking.

Wm Jas Tychonievich said...

Frank’s feed is working now. Thanks.

The subscribe link from Arrowsmith is what I’m using. No clue why it’s 11 years behind the times.

WG, I don’t know how the sidebar gadget works. It’s provided by Blogger, and I haven’t looked under the hood.

Francis Berger said...

Much appreciated David and Wm!

Bruce Charlton said...

Thanks to David E for the above info. - because of it, I have now been able to put the feed for updating Frank's blog onto my blog list.

WanderingGondola said...

Re Arrowsmith, to clarify: if you directly open the link in a browser, his newest post is clearly there in XML-ised form, so the feed generation itself is fine AFAICT. Could see if deleting and re-adding the URL fixes things on your end.

David Earle said...

Happy to help!

Allow me to put my nerd glasses back on 🤓

Leo's blog (https://reimaginingthebom.com/feed/) blocks bots which means RSS readers won't work

Luther's blog (https://luthert.web.illinois.edu/blog/feed.xml) is showing "How I think about changes to GEDCOM" as his latest post because it's at the top of the RSS feed as the latest/most recently updated post. His actual latest post "Is it I?" is third in the RSS feed

As for Arrowsmith (https://blackdogstar.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) I'm not sure, could be a Blogger cache issue since the RSS looks fine. Maybe it would self-correct if he made a new post

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