Tim Yang’s Blog

I had this feature in my earlier weblog. I had ten posts on the home page and I wanted to show in the sidebar a list of the ten posts that pre-dated the ones on the homepage. You can see the unstyled list on the sidebar right now. I used the get_posts function that comes in Wordpress. Although the_date function is supposed to work only within The Loop, somehow it works here. Here’s the code I used.

<ul id=\"earlierposts\">
<?php
$posts = get_posts('numberposts=10&offset=10&order=ASC');
foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp();
?>
<?php
echo \"<li><a href=\"\";
the_permalink(); echo \"\">\";
the_title('', '', true);
the_date('j M','</a> <em>','</em></li>');
?>
<?php
endforeach;
?>
</ul>

Mary Hodder of Napsterization.org has produced an analysis of five popular blog content search services (Bloglines, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse, Pubsub). She examines what each of them searches, how they search, what sort of links they count and how long they keep those links counted. It gives us some idea of why the results from each of the search engines differs so greatly from the others. For example, Bloglines keeps all data on inbound links from Day One whereas Technorati keeps link data as long as it is on the front page of a blog, so their link count is much lower but much fresher.

Hodder has put her research into a table on a PDF file for easy reference. I’m sure many people will be using her table to produce more insights into the way each of these search engines work. I hope she’ll include Icerocket.com in that table when it becomes more popular.

Feeddigest is finally released and it has all the features I’d been waiting for. It’s like RSSmix and Bloglines in one. You can combine feeds and there’s an interface where I can see and control all my mixes. There’s even a built-in online feed reader. When the statistics feature comes into play, Feedburner will have a competitor.

http://feeddigest.com/