weblogs.com is no longer useful

October 23, 2001 6:03 PM

weblogs.com is no longer useful (since I can't set favorites and have to scroll through a list of X hundred weblogs to see if the ones I am interested in have updated). Question: what else is there?
posted by sylloge to general weblog-related at 6:03 PM (18 comments total)

The subhonker filter is now blogtracker and will work fine after a day or so. Read about the transition here.

I never made a habit of using the shf or weblogs.com. Is it really worth the time it takes to set up?
posted by sudama at 6:16 PM on October 23, 2001

It was to me: it took the same amount of time as making a page of bookmarks for the sites I like to read (or maybe even less since all I had to do was click "I like it" or whatever next to the name of the site I wanted tracked) and I got a list of all those sites in the order they were last updated, along with the time (if they hadn't been updated in the last 48-72 or something hours, they didn't show up on the list).
posted by sylloge at 6:30 PM on October 23, 2001

It's interesting how Dave's domains initially contain reasonably useful content about their topics, and then just don't.

I'd love to see a good site about scripting at scripting.com, or even a good site about weblogs at weblogs.com.
posted by websavvy at 6:58 PM on October 23, 2001

No longer useful? But it's in XML, Stewart! XML makes everything better (or so I hear). And XML-RPC!! Even a chimp could do it!

On the surface, this is a classic example of a vendor trading features that are useful for the user (favorites) for features that are useful for the vendor (new backend makes the vendor's maintenance a breeze). However, it makes sense for Userland because we're not paying customers. It sucks, but whaddya gonna do?**

**You're gonna build your own favorites manager, that's what. If I'm reading him right (I'm speculating a lot here), that's what Dave wants people to do...he'll manage the main repository of data and the crawling, and other people can use the XML hooks to build apps that use all the data. Or something. My only problem with that is that it would be nice if all these little apps were located on weblogs.com and not distributed all over the Web willy nilly.

XML!
posted by jkottke at 7:00 PM on October 23, 2001

Server push is the future of the internet.
posted by websavvy at 7:20 PM on October 23, 2001

I gave up on visiting weblogs.com months ago because it was so slow to load and impossible to search. Doesn't subhonker filter do just about everything weblogs.com used to do?

I guess if there were a bookmarklet I could click to mark a site for tracking through weblogs.com/blogtracker, that might be convenient for me to bother setting it up.
posted by sudama at 7:28 PM on October 23, 2001

there's linkwatcher, too.
posted by Hackworth at 10:30 PM on October 23, 2001

The javascript include listing the updated favourites still works

<script src="http://favorites.weblogs.com/htmlFavorites.js?
title=updated blogs&width=150&titlebgcolor=ffffff&titletextcolor=000000&
framecolor=cccccc&bodybgcolor=ffffff&
membername=[e-mail]&hoursoffgmt=-5" type="text/javascript"></script>

Just replace [e-mail] with the email address you used for weblogs.com
posted by riffola at 10:30 PM on October 23, 2001

I tried them all and ended up with relying mostly on Spyonit. It's not perfect and there is a lag, but it's better than slowly pulling out each of your hairs individually, which is what using weblogs.com used to feel like.
posted by fooljay at 8:49 AM on October 24, 2001

Weblogs.com still sucks. As we all know, Winer is one of the more shameless self promoters out there and has in one fell swoop has eliminated most non-manilla, non-editthispage and non-weblogs.com sites (like mine). That's fine. It's his website and he can do what he wants with it.

I'm relying more and more on Daypop, the best weblog search engine out there for the time being. It's not scanned on a hourly basis, but I don't check weblogs more than once a day anyway.

Linkwatcher is good too.
posted by zeb vance at 9:23 AM on October 24, 2001

Oh, Evan's down with the XML and the RPC ... I suspect it won't be long before Blogger is notifying weblogs.com of updates. You can also ping weblogs whenever you update -- you can modify the link so it just takes a click and you don't need to fill out the form.
posted by sudama at 9:27 AM on October 24, 2001

I still use mark.weblogs.com which will do everything but search. I've never filtered the list, because my "favorites" turn up red and the others do not, so it feels pre-filtered to me already. plus those check boxes drive me nuts.

I'm going to look at subhonker again, though. the only problem I had with it before is that it looked time-consuming to set up.

I am left pinging weblogs.com by hand now, but since I do everything else by hand, I guess this shouldn't bother me. I dunno, maybe I should hire a chimp....
posted by rebeccablood at 9:33 AM on October 24, 2001

I loved the SubHonker Filter (the popup version, now Blogtracker). I'd just keep it open all day and refresh it from time to time, then when I had five minutes I'd pop over to a site I like.

To set it up can be time consuming, but it's not bad. The key is to just set all new to "Hidden" and then go and pick the individual sites you want to unhide.

I hope it's useful again once Blogger and others integrate the new system for flagging updates.
posted by mikel at 12:05 PM on October 24, 2001

What's wrong with the subscribe feature in IE 5? I've flagged twenty-odd sites in my bookmarks and run a check now and then. Takes about ten seconds to see which ones have changed since I was there last. Seems relatively painless.
posted by jga at 2:24 PM on October 24, 2001

The Subscribe feature in IE relies on Web sites actually returning the correct "last update" value when you do a HEAD request, which means it doesn't actually work most of the time.
posted by kindall at 3:47 PM on October 24, 2001

So, I'm curious about one thing. Does anyone find it even remotely possible to use the blogtracker "add a weblog" interface? There are thousands of entries, and they are indexed only by page number. As far as I can tell, there is just no way to quickly find a specific weblog, even if you know the name it's listed by.

Am I the only one who finds it unusable? The only way I could add what I wanted was to hack the cgi urls to show 1000 entries at a time, then use IE "Find".
posted by smackfu at 5:59 PM on October 24, 2001

You're right, smackfu, it's hard to page through all those entries. But once it's done you've got a great means of keeping track of when your favorite sites have been updated. ...That is, it will be great again, once everyone has figured out how to make their updates known. Are all you good bloggers taking the efforts required?
posted by owen at 9:14 AM on October 25, 2001

Does anyone find it even remotely possible to use the blogtracker "add a weblog" interface?

There is now a search box on the blogtracker Weblogs Preferences page. You can set search results to New, View or Hidden.
posted by todd at 4:14 PM on October 27, 2001