I did a quick 5 minute hack this morning that shows my latest blog entry in my signature. Right now, it's limited to just me, since the blog is on the same sub-net as the forum. Going out and grabbing everyone's blog entries dynamically would slow the forum down unnecessarily. But I'm curious what everyone thinks about it... With a little work, I could set it up so others could use it (maybe instead of the signature, show it under the username when viewing a post or something). Allowing others to do it would not be "realtime", as I would setup a cron job to run every few hours to grab everyone's latest entries so they can be cached on the server-side and not slow down the forum.
It is a nice idea Shawn. I would like to have my latest blog entries in my signature instead of the normal signature.
There are 1,345 members, fetching 1345 xml files a few times every day would not put any noteworthy stress on any server.
Wouldn't be much load because would just setup a cron job to run every few hours to grab the XML feeds.
hmm wouldnt it be possible to just make 1 cronjob and run a script which calculates how likely it is that there is a new post to blogABC based on the latest x posts? a blog which is updated several times daily could have a "refresh rate" of 2 hours while a nearly inactive blog could be refreshed every 2 days. if we're talking about up to 1300 blogs, it'd be less stress for your server and a bit less transfer for ours this way
The blog idea is kind of neat, considering I just created a few myself. It took forever to get the ftp issues resolved (it was a firewall problem preventing passive ftp). I say go for it (and I like mxlabs idea too)
Okay, it's done... You can add your blog's XML feed URL at: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/profile.php?do=editoptions Currently Blogger and Movable Type feeds are supported. Server checks hourly for new entries and updates them internally.
Hi Shawn, It doesn't seem it be working properly. I did the change in the forum options and wrote a new entry in my blog some hours ago, and I do not see any changes. What can I have done wrongly?