Doubting to shuō

Hackers may have taken it down for a while, but the Taiwan Blog Feed is redesigned and up again!

I have no idea why it was under such a brutal attack. I added any sites which met the criteria of being about Taiwan, teaching English or learning Chinese, and promptly removed anyone who asked to be. On top of that the site was entirely non-commercial, with no self-serving purpose what-so-ever. Nonetheless, it was under constant bombardment; perhaps some Chinese activist was upset at all the political blogs being aggregated, but it seems unlikely. In any case, it was pretty clear that the attacker had a Drupal kit. I upgraded the site to the newest version of Drupal in order to close some of its security holes, but that broke half the add-ons I had used to make the site.

So, I’ve moved the Taiwan Blog Feed to wordpress, which I’m much more familiar with. It should be easier for me to keep on top of maintaining the site now, too. People can’t add their sites anymore. Just leave me a comment if you want a particular site added (or if you’re the author and you want it removed).

After moving my sites to Dream Host, I made some upgrades the Taiwan Blog Feed.
continue reading…

Back when I first started this blog, the first one to link to me was Michael Turton. Every week he did a round-up off all the Taiwan blogs and somehow managed to dig up all the new and obscure blogs like mine. Truth be told, I’ve found most of the Taiwan blogs that I’ve really enjoyed through Michael’s blog round-ups. Unfortunately, like all good things, it had to come to an end. Doing a round-up of everybody’s blogging is a time-consuming task, and one that nobody could be expected to continue. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s thankful for all the round-ups he did have time for.

Since the discontinuation of the Taiwan Blog Round-up, I’ve been thinking of possible solutions. For a while, I entertained the idea of trying to get some friends together to do a “roving round-up”, in which we could take turns reading and blogging about the highlights of the local blogosphere each week. In the end, though, it was just too daunting. Instead, I’ve made a set up a news aggregator, which parses in each blog’s RSS (and to a less perfect degree, atom) feeds and publishes excerpts and links in the style of Google News. I’m still in the process of adding blogs to the Taiwan Blog Feed, and categorizing them. Once it’s completely up and running, this should help readers keep up with what’s going on in the English-speaking blogging community and hopefully drive a bit more traffic to some of the less well-known blogs, too.

If you want to see a blog added, send me your RSS link. Please restrict submissions to blogs primarily about Taiwan. If you publish RSS feeds for your blog but prefer not to have them parsed by this news aggregator, then email me and I’ll remove your blog.

Hello, all. I’ve made some improvements in the way tags are implemented on this site. Hopefully this post will help those of you who love reading what I write about language learning but can’t stand reading what I write about investing, or visa versa. At the bottom of each post, there is a tag. Click on that tag, and you’ll get a list of all the posts with that particular tag. As of today, each post in such a list will have an expandable summary and list associated tags at the bottom of each summary.

Advanced Searches

Beyond being able to search the posts under a single tag, you can also do AND searches with the logical operator “+”, and OR searches with the logical operator “|”. For example, http://toshuo.com/index.php?tag=geekery, will show you you all of my posts about geekery. If you wanted to see any post tagged both “Matt” AND “evil”, then you’d go to http://toshuo.com/index.php?tag=Matt+evil. Similarly, if you wanted to see any posts about “science” OR “culture”, then you’d go to http://toshuo.com/index.php?tag=science,culture.

Feeds

Now how about readers who want to see all of my posts, the WHOLE posts, on a given topic instead of just expandable previews? What about those who are just do lazy to click each post from a list, one by one? Do they get any love? You bet! If you use a feed reader, such as the Sage plug-in for Firefox, you can see all of my posts for a topic as if they were their own separate blog. If for example, you want to see the full posts of all of my Chinese textbook reviews, one after another type
http://toshuo.com/wp-rss2.php?tag=Chinese_Textbooks into your feed reader and you’ve got it! Feeds are available for both categories and tags, and you can use “+” and “,” operators for advanced searches, too.

Search Bookmark for my Site

For those of you using modern, powerful browsers such as Opera, Firefox, Seamonkey, or any other Mozilla-based offering, you can set up a search bookmark. I don’t think anybody, including myself, reads this blog enough to warrant it. That’s beside the point though. The whole point is you CAN make a Toshuo.com tag search bookmark! Make a bookmark (of anything), and then edit the properties of the bookmark. Change the “location” to http://toshuo.com/index.php?tag=%s, and yes I know that’s an invalid page. Then, edit the bookmark’s “keyword” (which starts out blank) to “ts”. Save the bookmark, and you’re good to go. Then, anytime you type “ts geekery” into your location bar, you’ll go to http://toshuo.com/index.php?tag=geekery; anytime you type “ts videos+books”, you’ll go to http://toshuo.com/index.php?tag=videos,books. Someday, I’ll might write a search box for my site to replace the Google one that will include this tag functionality, but for now you (hypothetical) guys (who I’ll pretend care about any of this geekery) will have to make do with the features I’ve added thus far.