Santa was a little upset when he showed up Christmas Eve in the wee hours to find what was once a plate of freshly baked oh-so-good chocolate chip cookies, was now a plate full of crumbs. A tall frosty glass of icy cold milk reduced to mere droplets sat uninvitingly, and I, resplendent with white moustache and typing away at the keyboard obliviously, in order to get the new Blog search done. I let him do his thing and he let me do mine and when I looked up at last, he was long gone. (oh, and in case you’re wondering he left me visual studio and sql server 2005 upgrades).

I must’ve been a good boy this year because I made several breakthroughs that night, and aside from the front end design, I’m pretty much done with it. A bit frustrating since the rest of the office is all busy with other end-of-the-year tasks I’m sure, but if they could just….check….out…what I’ve done, they would drop whatever it is they’re doing because it is simply fabulous. I am pleased, quite frankly, to tell you that I’ve successfully parsed many a stubborn RSS feed format, although there is still plenty of wacky stuff out there that unfortunately will exclude a few otherwise great blogs from the results.

Hopefully we’ll be able to incorporate more and more as time goes on. There are a few feeds that don’t give back any XML whatsoever; just some standard HTML, which I thought was kind of rude. But we actually have a nifty report that shows us what feeds were parsed successfully and what feeds weren’t, so we should be able to follow up with the site/blog later on.

It is quite nice to see the editorial team devoting as much effort to maintaining what is currently in the directories as they do to adding new sites/blogs etc. For those of you who have been anticipating the new search, uh, keep on anticipating! Seriously though, it shouldn’t be long now and I think it will really tie things together on the blog directory side. Especially since you’re not just searching for blogs, you’re actually searching for specific posts within those blogs. If something is being said out there about a specific topic you’re searching for, you’re going to know it. I know its been (and being) done by various others out there, but it’s still pretty cool that we’re doing it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 29th, 2005 at 2:38 am and is filed under Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.