Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Housekeeping - TOW, CTA

Hey all. So I got back my admin panel for City Transit Advocates after trying out Newsgator Pro. I wasn't able to do anything with it and unfortunately the one thing I would have liked to do wasn't available. There is one drawback though. When I update the aggregator with new blogs, the name displayed will be the author and not the blog, which is the silliest thing ever and drives me crazy, but I don't have control over it.

So I've started fiddling with yahoo pipes. So far it has a lot of potential for filtering news stories about transit out of blogs that might not be completely transit oriented among other cool features. But it might be a while before I can create an aggregator there. So bear with me as I try to make CTA the best it can be. Most of you now hopefully have Google Reader to keep up with all the transit blogosphere, but its nice to see what the headlines are in a quick glance and have it on the side of your blog.

Lastly, if there is a transit blog I'm missing on the roll at CTA let me know.

Update: For an example of what you can do with Yahoo Pipes, I made a Pacific Northwest Transit Aggregator. Still working out some bugs though.

2 comments:

FLUBBER said...

at CTA it seems that the author's name is listed now, which is nice, but it seems less useful than the name of the blog that published it, which is what i thought it was like before.
for example, greg dewar's post about "another car in the tunnel today" threw me at first b/c i thought it might be seattle, then i realized it was san francisco. Eitehr way, it would have been easier to know which city's tunnel it was if the post was from "the N-Judah Chronicles"

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

Yeah I know, i hate it too. The problem is that in order to be able to go back and add new blogs I had to revert back into the free mode. And the free mode is really lame in that they don't let me fix the script like I did for the pro mode. That's why I'm trying to work on the yahoo pipes, because the newsgator reverted back to before I went pro.

You can go to the bottom and read the old feed however(there are two on the page). It still has the names of the blogs on it and I'm not going to touch it so that it stays that way.