Developers Blog

Just an update, I am delighted to report that Bloggers.pk has been chugging along peacefully for a good long time, since its inception back in 2006 it has served the Pakistani blogging community quite well. Our vision was to provide one central place for bloggers to check new blog posts and feed traffic to each blogger individually. For those who have followed our development, we started off being a wordpress based blog aggregator which literally crumbled under the over whelming load of rising subscription counts, after a few months we were pushed into finding a stronger aggregation software and it lead us to Planet Planet.

The beauty of Planet Planet is that its purely an aggregator and does this work perfectly every time, more importantly this system does not attempt to alter your searching engine rankings on Google as the blog aggregator does not create permalinks of the posts stored on the site, since it is designed to display only the most reaction 100 posts after which the posts end up into a cache and trashed in 15 days. Evidence is also seen by the negligible traffic we get from Google, instead our traffic is limited to direct bookmarking and RSS feed subscription.

New blog syndication continue to pour in on a daily basis and this growth has kept our servers bogged down as it requires some serious number crunching to fetch each (200+) RSS feeds almost taking over 15 minutes ever hour on the hour. CPU times is one aspect which irritates a good working relationship with a hosting service and a few months back I was finally pushed to moving the entire Bloggers.pk site into a virtual dedicated host.

Naturally the bills have continued to climb, and after due thought I have as of today started displaying a few Google Ads on the main page. Let me assure you the revenue earned from these ads will simply be utilized for the upkeep of this site only, catering to the hosting bills as well as onward development, which I foresee in the near future considering the rampant growth of bloggers in Pakistan

If there is any blogger who may not feel comfortable with us displaying ads on the site along with his his/her blog syndication then they can request for removal. I fully respect copyright jurisdiction and can only offer removal for now, it must be remembered that Bloggers.pk is only presenting a summary post of your post and only helping expose your blog to more readers. I hope people support us in this move.

In a flurry of activity at Bloggers.pk have also managed to squeeze out one more improvement which I feel will help quite a few people even beyond our world of Blogging. We have adapted Google Custom Search Engine to scan only the websites of all registered Pakistani Bloggers

This tool can on occasions benefit people when they would like to limit their search capability to content being produced by Pakistani Bloggers. I for one, see one immediate benefit for all active bloggers which is to allow them a good opportunity to link-share relevant articles within the community. A search of keywords of your in-composition blog posts might bring up some good reference material which you can either actively use and then maybe provide a courtesy link to the specific blogger.

The feature is easily located on the side bar at Bloggers.pk

Finally after some serious hacking I was able to figure out a fix to fully implement the sharing of the Bloggers Pakistan OPML file. The link can be found on the side bar of the main Bloggers.pk page.

What do you do with the OPML file: For those geeks around here, the OPML file can be a god-send but for others its just may add more confusion. Quite simply if you are an avid feed reader and are sick and tired of reading the summary feeds as published by Bloggers Pakistan then its time for you to directly subscribe to the all registered bloggers directly and this OPML file shares the RSS links directly. (we publish summary feeds deliberately as we would like to promote traffic to the individual blogger)

The OPML file will be updated every hour on the hour along with the main aggregator. All said this just another addition to your Internet experience

Bloggers Pakistan is definitely growing by leaps and bounds, over the past two years we have developed a steady following both on the website as well via our RSS Feed. New subscriptions are also growing on a daily basis and as expected it then becomes a tough job filtering through each of them regularly, I instead prefer to do them in batches every two weeks (on occasions its longer).

I have decided to embark on some improvements to this aggregator which will definitely help the Pakistani blogging community as a whole.

Individual RSS Feeds: The first feature that has already come into effect is the RSS Feed links to all our subscribed individual blogs this will allow our readers to directly subscribe to their favorite blogs right from the Bloggers.Pakistan website. With this new feature I would soon expect to see the individual blogs benefit directly from this development as they would then hopefully see a rise in feed subscriber count, granted it will not be as a direct result from this new change but surely it may have some impact

OPML Feed: The other feature that is presently in developemnt and should be out soon is that Bloggers Pakistan will publish an OPML file and make it available to all our readers allowing them to directly subscribe to the entire list of blogs registered on Bloggers Pakistan directly into their own Feed Readers, no more summary feeds as served by BP, but instead you will enjoy reading blogs directly. This will surely boost individual feed numbers and we will enjoy smiling at our subscriber count (ego boost). I am at the moment figuring out (read learning) on how to implement this feature, but I hope to sort this problem out very soon.

We at Bloggers Pakistan want to work hard to ensure that this blog aggregator continues to progress forward, some people may have noticed that in the recent few days a number of errors were creeping up on the site and the formatting was throwing everything into haywire. We took this opportunity to spend a little more time and work out a better solution for the website.

The old theme was a little too complex to actually sit down and clean up in hope of removing all the errors, problems ranged from HTML::TMPL coding to a complex design layout and to make matter worse two separate CSS sheets to understand.

I simply trashed the old theme found myself another neat and clean layout and worked the HTML::TMPL code into it, it proved to be a walk in the park. We now have a new design and I hope people find this a lot more interesting to read and follow.

PS there are a few blogs which are having problems, I hope to sort them out soon.

As usual we always remain open to suggestions and ideas.

After many days of procrastination, I finally got down to doing a revamp of the blog aggregator that we run at bloggers.pk. Barely two months back in early December I quit on the ever faithful wordpress CMS system simply because it was not designed to be an efficient aggregator. I moved away from WordPress and into PlanetPlanet the perfect system to run a blog aggregator. The only problem with it is that you need a little time and effort to configure and bring it into a full jog, especially for a person like myself it meant to learn and dabble in the coding language HTML::Template.

Bloggers Pakistan was basically an effort to provide one concise place to display updated posts appearing in the Pakistani blogosphere it was also a great tool to monitor all blogspot.com hosted sites as with the Blogspot ban it was cumbersome to visit a blog and discover its not been updated. All said it might have even projected some good bloggers to be exposed to a wider variety of people surfing the blogosphere.

The present theme employed at the blog aggregator was one selected after much consideration from the Open Web Design website made by Gerhard Wolfgang. To customize the theme and incorporate it into the HTML::Template language took a little hard work as generally one was unable to visualize the outcome without having it uploaded on to the server and run the planet engine through it everytime we made even the slightest change. The learning curve for HTML::Template was not bad, I now have a decent idea of the stuff being used in the aggregator but if someone was to ask me to solve another problem, I might simply look into his eye with a blank face almost as if to say ‘What the heck?, come again!!!!’ Simply said I learnt what I needed to learn and there you have it.

I get the feeling blog aggregators should become popular with time, the more and more people start opening blogs worldwide it would become progressively difficult to monitor everything and hope to remain on top of the topic of interest so blog aggregators can provide every one with one concise location to read everything. This weekend I have definitely had more appreciation for the overall concept and may have an idea or so for another blog aggregator (on a global level), but if you have an idea for a blog aggregator then drop me an email, maybe we can work something out.

After months of inherent problems with Bloggers.pk we would like to announce that we have successfully installed Venus a version of PlanetPlanet, an engine used to run hundreds of blog aggregators worldwide.

WordPress, the CMS which we were using previously was technically not a dedicated aggregator and it was with the use of a plug-in called FeedWordpress I was able to manage the system for some few months but throughout its time it was constantly acting up requiring daily if not hourly monitoring to keep it running on track.

For our RSS feed subscribers please ensure that you have the updated URL. I would at the same time like to ask for a volunteer to help us design a registration form which can help the smooth flow of registration of all new blogs. Now with Venus fully installed, I hope to sit back and relax. Design critque welcome

Bloggers.Pakistan has been under some tremendous stress handling the Ghee-infested salan-slurping Pakistani Blogging scene and for a few days and quite a number of people have noticed that their blog posts are not appearing on the site, We have a Problem, Houston!

All credit to an ever expanding network of Pakistani bloggers that we continue to grow with the addition of a few new blogs literally every day, our system is designed that the server automatically checks every blog for a new post every 30 minutes and goes down the list of bloggers in the process if in any case a blog causes an exceptionally large timeout or is unreachable it sometimes halts the process dead in its tracks, quite often I have had to blame Blogspot for this problem. It simply cannot continue like this and we need to find a solution to handle this mess

To reduce and control this expanding network we would like to delete dormant bloggers who have not posted within the last 45 days, this deletion may result in deletion of the account and to be re-instated one must apply again.

We continue to be selective in our criteria to accept blogs and don’t entertain blogs which are less then two months old, please submit your blog after you have actively blogged for a good sixty days.

In the 4 months of operation we have literally collected over 8000 posts from all our authors some very active others literally sleeping, we have started to delete all posts within our database once they get over a pre-set limit of 90 day. This will effectively reduce our database to a more manageable level.

Additionally if someone feels their blog post are not appearing in the aggregator please message us so that we can address the problem. I assure you that we are on the issue and hope we can successfully resolve this issue in due coarse.

Friends and supporters of the Pakistani Blogosphere, its been a few months since we (Omer & myself [Awab]) have been working hard to maintain this site, keeping track of ongoing bugs and fixing day to day problems associated with so many different varieties of bloggers syndicating their posts. Its tough and requires at least one hour daily to just keep things in order. Despite all our efforts we apologize for any inconvenience caused, but most likely its either beyond our control or simply remains unnoticed.

We are proud to have over 200 registered bloggers with an almost equal number of registered readers. We now feel that its time to revamp this website design and adopt a better and a unique theme for this blog aggregator, more adequately representing the Pakistani Blogging community.

Pakistan has a wealth of talented designers and we would like to tap on this potential hence are now on the hunt for a willing contributor who may help us in this regard. The specifications that are presently being used on the site are as follows

WordPress 2.0.4
Feedwordpress v0.98
the_excerpt_reloaded
Dans Avatar thingy
Ultimate Tag Warrior
WP-PostRatings

We are open to design changes but hope that it can incorporate these main core components with improvements or modifications. Any brilliant designer willing to help out, email us or post a comment here and we would really love to show off your work to the world.

After some considerable discussion we have decided to remove all images embedded in the posts appearing on the Bloggers.Pakistan web page.

This step has been taken primarily to improve our page load time as recently the entire page was taking a massive 1MB to download, with a number of our readers from Pakistan using dial-up’s it can be a nightmare to wait for the entire page to load. The primary issue pushing the load times to such proportions were the pictures embedded on various posts which were being syndicated from the bloggers websites.

With the removal of all embedded images we have now dropped the total page size to around a manageable 300kb surely allowing everyone to download with much greater ease. Initially when we launched BP a few months back our team felt that images brought life into the website but with time we have felt that blog readers enjoyed the images and did not actually go to the bloggers website for more interaction a prime example were Photoblogs.

I hope you all agree to this new development