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Sidewide blog directory

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A page that lists all existing blogs alphabetically.

I can imagine this is *not* easy (large sites, multiple page-requests, caching problems, etc.)

Maybe it is possible to show a .. z with ten blogs from each letter and a link ‘more…’

Once clicked on that link, a user will see first 50 blogs beginning with that letter. And page forward / backward (count* would not be server intensive).

This is something that I have never found. Some people tried but the need for caching and possiby cron jobs drives them away from wanting to develop this it seems.

Sun, 1 Mar 2009 16:34:21
  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    Andrea wrote an article on the subject:

    http://wpmututorials.com/how-to/making-a-member-list-blog-directory/

    We have this on some of our sites. The concept is to set it up to run once an hour, run through the db and build the html from that, save the resulting html in the db, and serve that when people want the directory.

    edit: I would think that if you used wp-super-cache or something along those lines, it wouldn’t be that much of an issue. Unless you have 20k+ blogs.

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    Kuka, are you caching in some way or is the data live? What are you using to count views? We have wp-shortstat on our blogs which counts views. Once an hour, we have a script that runs through the blogs, pulls the count and lists via that method. (Well most of the sites are like that. One does it’s data collection every 4 hrs. One uses comment counts.)

    edit: Oh yeah. One does this weird word counts from posts and comments, divided by the number of posts (but not comments. go figure) with a variable applied for life of blog, and all that divided by the number of views and a few more things thrown in. That was a b*tch to work out.

    I’ll be honest. I don’t like the idea of listing via the number of blog posts made. (No offense, Kuka) I could go over to your site, import 1400 posts from my site and be #1. (Again, no offense) I know the example function that comes with wpmu does it that way. Kind of bothers me as I think it’s a bad example. Probably the only thing you can do though with what’s in core. Unless you go comment count instead.

  • kuka
    • Flash Drive

    i completely agree that number of posts is not the best measure of popularity and we gonna change it to views soon…not a big deal,

    we didnt want to use any of the stats plugins as they put too much overhead on the server without being as useful as google analytics, so we just use wp_postviews from lesterchan on single blogs, and then on the blog list page a function gets total views from every single blog. this works with wp-super-cache as well. we do use caching sometimes but we are still too small to really need it. so views are real-time

  • drmike
    • DEV MAN’s Mascot

    wp_postviews from lesterchan on single blogs

    That’s what we use for hot posts counts. At least I think that’s the one. Can’t remember right off and currently working on another platform so I can’t go check. (edit: That’s gamerz’ one, right?)

    this works with wp-super-cache as well

    Full mode or half? I’m actually surprised as gamerz has his stuff works fine with super but yet it’s not javascripts. We’re running all the sites in half mode with super.