Developers Blog

We would like to announce the launch of a forum dedicated for the sole purpose of discussing various issues related to the blogging community in Pakistan.

Check it out at Forum.Bloggers.pk

As the administrators of Bloggers.Pakistan we have seen a couple of problems managing this aggregator for all Pakistani blogs. We strictly do not want to act as a policing agency but need to resort to some sort of discipline.

It is sad to note that many bloggers listed on our syndication prefer to adapt a re-blogging method, which sadly is not in the true spirit of blogging. As administrators DO NOT moderate posts but prefer to draw specific guidelines so that it ensures a good mixture of posts appearing on the aggregator

• We only accept bloggers who have been active bloggers for atleast a minimum of two months
• Deny / Stop syndication of bloggers who continue to strictly adapt a copy/paste blog posts
• Prefer to maintain a good mixture of blog posts, any blogger posting more then 4-5 posts a day (in a re-blogging pattern) we simply delete any excessive posts, this action is needed as a few bloggers have repeatedly made 10+ posts a day and it has completely hijacked other bloggers with original content
• To maintain some discipline according to our template coding we need to edit a few posts appearing on the page, basically only to re-size images and remove any -align- tags which appear in the text, larger images create havoc on the system and the align tags is also a constant problem

We are open to suggestions to make this aggregator a better place for all – please feel free to offer suggestions and we naturally are always in search of techies willing to help make this concept even better.

We know that a considerable number of reader depend upon reading these posts via RSS feed syndication.

For the past few days we were constantly having problems with an invalid feed, mostly caused by some blogger inserting any invalid code into the system, it usually meant that I would have to track that specific code and edit it out of the offending post. It basically took too much time, so we finally decided to move our RSS feed to Feedburner. It has solved this issue and corrects the problems automatically.

You can continue to access the feed at www.bloggers.pk/feed/.

In order to ensure to that Bloggers.Pakistan site is user/reader friendly, we have planned further enhancements to the site. Proposed changes that are to be implemented in the next coming days are as follows:

Continue reading ‘Bloggers.Pakistan Site Improvement Task List’

A Pakistani Blog Aggregator would not be complete without the incorportation of Urdu blogs. At the time of our launch we were having difficulty trying to incorporate unicode into our system, but thanks to the efforts of Zack we are now officially Urdu-enabled.

We open the registration process for all Urdu bloggers to become a part of the Bloggers.Pakistan network

Bloggers.Pakistan would like to thank Adnan Siddiqui for creating a mini-script that allows all Blogspot URL’s to automatically use the PKBLOG.com service. We will be implementing this nifty solution until we are able to figure out a viable solution oursleves and not overburden PKBLOGS.com servers

Bloggers.Pakistan now boasts another nifty feature called TAG IT!

A community driven tagging system perfectly designed to improve the overall blog reading experience for everyone using Pakistan’s First and Only Blog Aggregator – www.bloggers.pk. In the first week of launch we have processed over 70 applications of which a few are still pending due to technical errors (mostly inaccessible feeds and a few due to our inability to incorporate Urdu Unicode). All registered blogs have in turn submitted a massive total of over 800 posts into our system. Eight hundred posts is indeed a massive number and for any human to filter and digest its contents naturally a herculean task. We needed a creative solution….
Continue reading ‘TAG IT!’

We (Omer Alvie and Dr. Awab Alvi) are pleased to announce the launch of Pakistan’s first and only Blog Aggregator at www.bloggers.pk, a one-stop site to preview what is being said in the Pakistani blogosphere.

It started off as a casual discussion between two chat-buddies which slowly took the shape of a massive effort to bring a simple dream into reality. We had our share of late night sessions not to mention bus loads of bugs, we played with a number of ideas even tested CMS systems like Drupal and reBlog to finally land back to my favourite WordPress, which was spiced up with a handful of useful plug-ins, were we then able to achieve our goal
Continue reading ‘Launch of Bloggers.Pakistan’