What's New at Planet Journals.ie?

As you may know, Planet of the Blogs rebranded as Planet Journals.ie on its first birthday (1st April 2006).

Since then, we’ve upgraded MySQL from 4.0 to 4.1 to allow for nested queries (hence the downtime during the week while we dumped, upgraded MySQL and reimported the database), and we are now using the latest version of the Planet PHP aggregator by chregu.

Some of the nifty new features on the site include:

• Top Talk, a nice little search option which shows all recent blog posts linking to the top linked URLs from the past 7 days
• The aforementioned top 7 links from blogs
• Top tags from the past 3 days
• Browsing by tags (at last!)
• More information on blogs (will have a facility for language detection, geographic locations, and website thumbnails soon)
• What blog entries link to the current blog
• Advanced search (by tag, link, etc.) and combined searches (see our search options page for more)
• Feeds of not only tags (as provided in WordPress) but also of searches, e.g. the
  Galway tag in RSS and a government search in Atom (just prepend the URL with atom, rss or rdf)

Of course, there are still some things to fix: allow an “old style” view of the site, check the XML-RPC ping mechanism (I think it works!), re-add the clickthrough counter, etc. At first, I wasn’t sure about not being able to see the post content without clicking on the + symbols, but it does give a good overview of who is posting what, when, and who follows on from who very quickly. I still think it would be nice to have both view styles available, so will look at that next…

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