Not sure exactly what Jeremy does there, but he's basically the only person (I know) who speaks the same language I do at the Times. Maybe Martin Nisenholtz does too, but he's so far up the ladder, the only projects I get to do with him are really big ones, and the Times isn't doing those these days (though of course they should, now more than ever).
Anyway -- Jeremy and I are members of the same tribe.
And our breakfasts are full of ideas.
This week one of the things we talked about were NY blogs.
I've been trying to get a sense of what's going on in the "New York Blogging Community," imagining that there is such a thing. I don't know why there should be, any more than there's a "San Francisco Blogging Community" or even a "Berkeley Blogging Community." But since I'm new to NY, my naivete and fresh eyes are good for something, and envisioning a community of bloggers who go out to eat at great restaurants in each of the boroughs is something that appeals to me. Probably because my life here isn't yet cluttered with many other things on my plate.
When Jeremy got back to work, he dug in. Turns out the Times has a list of NY blogs. One of the things the TImes is very good at is making lists. They have four editors for every reporter, I hear, and one of the things those editors do is make lists.
Their list of blogs was done in WordPress, and it turns out you can get OPML from a blogroll in WordPress. Someone was thinking! But the OPML doesn't have RSS feeds, which makes sense, since the person entering the URLs didn't care so much aobut the feeds as they did about the web pages. Not a problem. Back in the early days of RSS someone came up with a convention for linking an HTML page to its feed. Most of the blogs in the Times list obey this convention, so I was able to write a script that, in fifteen minutes or so, while I killed some time playing, got me most of the feed URLs.
Then I had to do a teeny bit of River2 programming to get it to subscribe to the feeds on the server that's doing the East Village aggregator, and voila..
http://nyblogs.org/
I still have to tweak up the OPML that's linked into the page -- it's the OPML for the East Village blogs plus the NY blogs -- or maybe not, after all the East Village is part of NYC, no?
See why I like Jeremy? We had breakfast on Tuesday, on Thursday the aggregator is up.
http://bit.ly/d4ZMH0
