Yes, I plead guilty.
Planet Atheism hasn’t been maintained by me for a while (several months, in fact). I used to sometimes let new additions “accumulate”, but for the last few months I’ve let my PA email folder grow (and grow and grow), so that I currently have more than 110 blogs waiting to be added. I’ve also had requests for address changes that I haven’t replied to yet.
And, yes, this is mostly due to laziness on my part. I had also been waiting for a new version of FeedWordPress which would fix the duplicate posts problem, and allow me to upgrade WordPress to its newer versions, but, apparently, the FWP author has been as lazy as myself, so that excuse went down the drain. :)
Anyway, more than 100 new blogs would mean that PA would double in size, and size is already a problem: the number of posts per day means that it’s almost impossible to read every post, and the front page changes too quickly (yes, I don’t like reading PA in an aggregator – call me weird).
A possible solution is to create “Planet Atheism 2” (the name will probably be different), which will have all the new blogs. This is a far from perfect solution, as it forces people to read two separate sites (or aggregate two feeds), but I think it’s better than the alternative; a 200-blog aggregator simply doesn’t work. Imposing a tag system, or something similar, would force bloggers to change their way of blogging, and that would never do.
I’ll have news soon. And, again, sorry for my laziness.
3 comments:
Here's a suggestion: start a new planet: "Best of Planet Atheism", require a tags, and ask for a voluntary cap of 1 post/week/blog.
Allow people from the old Planet Atheism to move over to the "Best of" planet. This should thin out the existing planet.
You don't have to worry about that a lot. People who don't want to read everything can always use some alternatives.
You can perhaps just parse the Planet through AideRSS and use the widget to allow overwhelmed people to subscribe to the quality they want.
Another concept is here but this needs someone to code it of course.
What sort of tag system would you implement? Personally, I doubt I would mind something like that.
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