Riscos.org switches to weblog format

By Chris Williams. Published: 12th Jun 2005, 02:34:16 | Permalink | Printable

"Woke up this morning, had some toast, switched on the Iyonix, brushed my teeth. Then I checked my email.."

Riscos.org has this weekend relaunched in the style of a blog, discarding its previous portal website format. The site is currently the second highest result when searching for "RISC OS" on Google, joining other top results that are also arguably floundering in terms of up-to-date content.

Riscos.org was redesigned in October 2004 and since then site admin Paul Vigay managed to post about three articles plus one spoof for April Fools day. In his first post on the new riscos.org weblog, Paul explained, "As there seems to be numerous news and article portals for RISC OS, and I seem to have little time for updating the site, I thought I'd turn RISCOS.org into more of a weblog type portal, so that I can put comments and articles up as I see fit."

"Hopefully, this will enable me to keep it a bit more up-to-date and feature new items more often," he added.

According to Paul, the old-style riscos.org had multiple contributors, although it's usually just him posting articles whilst some editors even had their posting privileges reduced following a number of incidents of misuse. The new website can still accommodate other writers besides Paul.

On the new weblog format, Paul commented, "At least now I can login and post from anywhere, so it should make updating a bit easier - and I can still publish articles and tutorials etc, but just in a blog type way instead of uploading html pages etc."

The new weblog style for riscos.org strongly resembles Paul's personal online diary, and in fact, uses the same content management software homegrown by Paul. Although he's kindly linked to drobe.co.uk, we note that he overlooked the question on whether or not a weblog is the best use for a website that turns up high in search engine results for our platform - although the links database, which is useful if well maintained, is still available albeit tucked away on the new site. It can't take a lot of effort to better, and compensate for, the likes of riscos.net, myriscos.co.uk and, in some ways, riscos.com, which sit at the top of the Google results pages for those stumbling across RISC OS and the post-Acorn era, and wanting to find out more.

Links

Riscos.org website Bloggers to take over the world, film at 11

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Discussion

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Looking at the riscos.org site it would seem easy to get Paul to add a line: other RISC OS news portals above the date. This would quickly and easily enable viewers to move on from a prominent site if the wbelog was not what they wanted.

rmac on 12/6/05 3:30AM
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"we note that he overlooked the question on whether or not a weblog is the best use for a website that turns up high in search engine results for our platform"

Quite honestly its up to Paul what goes up on that site, and not for Drobe to comment on what or what is not suitable for someone elses project.

Trapper on 12/6/05 5:15AM
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In case someone else wants to start a blog but not write the scripts for it. A friend of mine wrote a free opensource blog web tool in php. It's called pivot and you can find it here: [link] To see what it looks like you can view his own blog here: [link] (Netherlandis)

It might be fun for me to try to install this on me Iyonix. What would I need to set up a webserver and run php?

Jaco on 12/6/05 9:11AM
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@Jaco: Webjames and PHP. See [link]

JGZimmerle on 12/6/05 10:29AM
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Trapper: That doesn't stop people commenting on what's appropriate to put on drobe, does it?

Nevertheless, as explained in the article, riscos.org is a potentially high-profile site, it's more than fair that there be concern about what appears on it to positively promote RISC OS.

And yes, you could say the same about riscos.info (which sadly doesn't appear until the second page of Google hits), although no one's chosen to recently which is perhaps a shame, as there are plenty of improvements that could be made.

mrchocky on 12/6/05 11:32AM
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Why isn't drobe even on the first page of google hits? Isn't there anything you can try to do about it?

Trapper: I think it is fair comment for Drobe to make; both sites are intended to be for the furtherment of RISC OS. It looks really really bad to have this new blog as the second hit on google. Perhaps drobe could let Paul move his blog to a subdomain of drobe, and then Paul could redirect riscos.org to the drobe front page?

senduran on 12/6/05 11:32AM
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Ick, use of javascript to open popup comments pages. Then again, I suppose it's up to Paul what goes on the site, and it's not for me to comment on what is not suitable for someone else's project...

takkaria on 12/6/05 11:49AM
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Surely it would be more fair to let Paul actually start putting things on the site before critisising it?

andypoole on 12/6/05 11:50AM
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"it's not for me to comment on what is not suitable for someone else's project"

Of course it is. It's just optional whether or not he listen

-- Spriteman

Spriteman on 12/6/05 1:48PM
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andypoole: Surely it'd be far more sensible if he didn't change it until he had something to pu on the site?

This is a common dumb thing to do. Loads of people take down their current site when redesigning it. I never did understand that.

nunfetishist on 12/6/05 2:05PM
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nunfetishist: Probably because it's the easiest way of testing something is going to work..

(You probably won't see this for another two hours, going by the ammount of time it took drobe to post my last comment...)

andypoole on 12/6/05 2:15PM
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andypoole: Most people just set up a seperate site to develop on and test. Shrug. Did many people visit riscos.org anyway?

nunfetishist on 12/6/05 3:34PM
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Where's [link] gone, anyway?

moss on 12/6/05 3:39PM
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Awaiting its expirey

nunfetishist on 12/6/05 4:01PM
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Gah. I should know not to bother trying to get one over you

moss on 12/6/05 4:02PM
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I agree that, ideally, the first few 'google hits' would be relevant, well-written, up-to-date and attractive (something that RISC OS pages generally are not, IMO). Since we have no direct control over google, site maintainers should all be striving for this (as highlighted in this drobe article: [link])

The abscence of drobe in the first page of google results surprises me greatly (this couldn't be a robots.txt issue, could it?) Unfortunately, the domain name riscos.co.uk /is/ returned, which has no useful content in google's site excerpt -- I certainly wouldn't click through that google hit.

Google must work in mysterious ways

Hertzsprung on 12/6/05 7:20PM
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IIRC Google places a site high on search results, when there are many other sites linking to it.

JGZimmerle on 13/6/05 10:35PM
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JGZimmerle:

Thanks!

It was actually quiet easy to set up. There is a webjames version with PHP support. The only difficulty was to get the pivot filetypes right and get rid of the [0D]s. This I did by adding PHP to mimemap and using ascii ftp from windows to RISC OS.

Jaco on 14/6/05 9:28PM
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Drobe is 8th on google front page, for me at least.

druck on 17/6/05 11:08AM
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