Today, the company I’m working for officially launched Skyrock Blog a few hours ago, the international version of Skyblog, a popular french blog service. If you never heard about it, give it a try. Skyrock Blog has no bells, no whistles, but it focuses on ease of use.
English, German, Dutch and Spanish translations are now available.
The biggest part of the work was (and is… the work is still not really complete yet…) to change the software, hardware and network architecture. In past, we used to create static HTML files everytime the content of a blog changed. But access times of hard disks quickly became a showstopper. Now, there is no more static HTML files, PHP scripts are now serving everything and a farm of memcache servers are trying to reduce the database load. Everything works like a breeze so far, but given the insane amount of hardware that was added to the previous infrastructure, the opposite would be hard to believe.
I didn’t work that much on the user-visible part and to be fair, I didn’t want to. Recycling old and twisty code is not something I’m fond of. Kudos to the colleagues who did an amazing work at sorting that out. I worked on statistics tools, moderation, and various boring things that are mandatory but that no user really cares about.
The international version of Skyblog is just a first step. There is more, more, more stuff to come.
RSS feeds are finally there, but only with basic text. Intentionally no encoded content and no picture. This is very frustrating. I’m currently watching about 50 interesting blogs, and without correct RSS feeds this is something I just couldn’t do. Almost every blog system out there has correct RSS feeds. Skyblog had none, it’s why some times ago I made a small script to create one. Now, Skyrock Blog has RSS feeds, but without any picture. These feeds are pointless, especially since most articles from Skyrock Blog are picture-centric.
It’s why I decided to release the tool in public domain. Grab the Skyblog RSS / Skyrock Blog RSS generator and you’ll get RSS feeds for any Skyrock Blog, with full text and pictures. This is a simple Ruby script that fetches pages like any web browser does, then it parses the content and packs it up to an RSS feed. Ruby makes it so easy to write such tools. You don’t even need any web server, thanks to WEBrick. Just start the server :
./skyrock-blog-rss.rb &
And then get your Skyrock Blog RSS feeds from:
http://127.0.0.1:2000/rss?u=user name
Have fun.