Blaggregator

Blog post aggregator for the Recurse Center community. Live version runs at https://blaggregator.recurse.com (RC login required).

What is this?

During her batch, Sasha (W '13) noticed that her peers were all blogging about their work at the Recurse Center on their individual blogs. It was really cool to see what they were working on and thinking about.

Some folks would post about their new posts in Zulip, some on Twitter, and some wouldn't spread the word at all. There was all this great work going on, but it was scattered across the internet.

Blaggregator puts all this awesome content in one place, and provides a place for the members of the community to read and discuss it. This has the nice side effect of providing a friendly audience for those who may have just launched their blog.

These awesome people have helped make Blaggregator better!

License

This software is licensed under the terms of the AGPL, Version 3. The complete license can be found at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.html.

FAQ

How does it work?

Once an hour, the crawler checks all registered blogs for new posts. New posts are displayed on the main page and a message is sent to Zulip.

"New" is defined as a post having a new URL and a new title. So you can tweak the title, change the content or the timestamp to your heart's content.

Why do I have to log in?

The Recurse Center staff wishes to keep the list of people attending the Recurse Center private. So you are required to authenticate with your Recurse Center credentials

If that ever changes (for instance, to surface the best posts that are coming out of the Recurse Center to show off what we're working on) you will be given lots and lots of warning to decide how you want to participate.

Who's behind it?

Sasha is the main author, with a bunch of other recursers contributing. You are welcome to contribute as well!

Puneeth is the primary maintainer, currently.

Can I contribute fixes and features?

Yes, that would be great! This is a project by and for the Recurse Center community. Help make it more awesome!

There's a very generic and high level list of areas that could use some help and a bunch of specific open issues.

Look at the developer documentation for help with setting up your development environment.

Before implementing a major contribution, it's wise to get in touch with the maintainers by creating an issue (or using an existing issue) to discuss it.

What's the stack?

It's a Django (Python) app, with some Bootstrap on the frontend. It's deployed on Heroku using their Postgres and Scheduler add-ons. Check out the code here.

I don't see my blog post.

If you published it less than an hour ago, hang tight: it'll show up when the crawler next checks the registered blogs. If Blaggregator finds many new posts on your blog, it will only post the two most recent posts to Zulip. All of your posts will still be available on the site

My blog post appears on blaggregator but no Zulip notification sent.

For every crawl a maximum of 2 notifications are sent for posts that haven't already been seen by blaggregator. So, if you published more than 2 posts between consecutive (hourly) crawls by blaggregator, only the last two posts will be notified on Zulip.

My blog is multi-purpose and not wholly code/Recurse Center specific

No problem! RCers usually enjoy reading non-technical posts by others.

But, if you like, you could tag or categorize your relevant posts and make a separate RSS/Atom feed for them. Most blogging software has separate feeds for different categories/tags.

If you use Wordpress, for instance, categorize all your code-related posts "code", say. Then your code-specific RSS feed that you should publish to Blaggregator is: http://yoururl.com/blog/category/code/feed/.

Can I lurk?

Sure, just make an account and don't add your blog. But you shouldn't lurk. You should blog.

Why should I blog?

It provides a record of your thinking and work for your future self.
It gives prospective employers insight into the way you think.
If you do a project that doesn't go as planned, you can still 'finish' the project and explain what you learned, even if you don't want to put the code on Github.
It helps more people hear about and respect the Recurse Center, which in turn means more people will want to work with you.
Writing helps you practice communicating, which is critical if you plan on working on a team of more than one person.
It helps the developer community at large.

But blogging takes too long!

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your posts don't have to be long, groundbreaking, perfect, or full of citations. Short, imperfect, and published always beats unpublished.

But I haven't found the perfect blogging tool

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Just get something up and resist the urge to fiddle with it. Use Tumblr if you have to. Just start writing.

I need some more inspiration.

You Should Write Blogs (Steve Yegge)
How to blog about code and give zero fucks. (Garann Means)
Please add your fave inspiration with a pull request.

I need some accountability!

Consider starting your own Iron Blogger challenge. Participants commit to writing one blog post a week, and are on the hook for $5 if they don't post. The pot can be used for a party, donated to charity, or donated to a charity the group hates (added incentive to hit the publish button!).

The Fall 2013 batch ran a very successful Iron Blogger program. Mike Walker wrote a very nice article on how it worked.