BigBlogZoo Blog Browser, Spider and SMF Portal

[kent]

Today I am happy to announce the first limited release of beta version 1.0.4 of the BigBlogZoo. The BigBlogZoo Application is a semantic browser, reaggregater, spider and simple machines community. You can help foster this community by trying it out for free.

Please feel free to download it, install it and give me feedback.

There are two versions available for download.

One has a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) bundled into. A JRE is a bit like Tourette Syndrome, if you know what it is, you probably have it.  If you are unsure use the version without the JRE. If you know you have a JRE 1.5 or newer than you can use the version without the JRE.

Minimum System Requirements:
Windows (other linux & mac come later), 512 mg Ram, Basic Internet Connection (If you intend to use the crawler with a basic internet connection be sure to limit the scope of the crawls)

Recommend System Requirements
1024 mg Ram, High Speed Internet Connection

With JRE:
http://www.bigblogzoo.com/release1.0.4/bigblogzooandjre.exe

Without JRE:
http://www.bigblogzoo.com/release1.0.4/bigblogzoo.exe


This is not a general release version, however this is a stable version. The general release version should be out late next month with more features and hopefully will incorporate your comments.

Some notable things are missing, for example help, but I will give you a quick summary of the features to help you along.

On the left are newsfeeds or blogs. What is a newsfeed you ask? A newsfeed is a semantic reference to a web page. What is a semantic reference to a web page you ask? A newsfeed gives structure to the web by implementing things like dates, languages, categories, and descriptions. I have organized 75,000 newsfeeds. In the next version when you add a newsfeed it goes into the shared bigblogzoo.

What can this thing do? Well this release has the following features:

NewsSpider. The news spider goes through the directories you tell it to and finds articles that it has never seen. So if you have an interest in Soccer then go under Sports/Soccer and send the spider out to find new articles.

SpiderSearch. You can tell the spider to only return articles that meet certain criteria.

FeedSearch. You can search for feeds that you are interested in. The results go MyZoo.

AutoDetect. Many web pages now have newsfeeds associated with them. Use this feature to detect those feeds and add them to the BigBlogZoo or to your zoo.

Reaggregation. Have you ever gone to a webpage and they have a link of news articles? Normally these articles have been reaggregated or "gathered". Reaggreagation just means that you republish xml feeds. However this is not publishing in the strict sense of the term. Newsfeeds are supposed to represent abstractions of webpages, therefore for most practical purposes a newsfeed is covered under fair use. If a person wishes to publish their entire web content in a newsfeed, they can, but they are implicity violating the intent of a newsfeed. What this means for you is if you have a blog or a website you can reaggregate articles and show them on your blog or website.

Tabbed Browsing: under the file menu.

Drag and Drop: Edits to the tree works with either cut and past or drag and drop.

The other feature which will be in the release version 1 is mechanism to submit newsfeeds into a central database of newsfeeds. That way the BigBlogZoo can grow with your efforts. You submit a feed and everyone will be able to see it.

If you have any question feel free to ask.

If you find any bugs, please tell me and tell me how to reproduce them and you will get a free copy of the release version.

Ideally if for questions or comments I would like you to use the forum.

Kent Gibson
The ZooKeepr

here is a screenshot:

[Ciinien]

I'm beta testing this software and so far I like what I see a lot. Only a couple of minor issues which Kent is probably already working on. I continue to test and look forward to using BBZ as an adjunct to my site(s) news content--erm... once I figure that part of the app out...

Cheers!
Ci

[kent]

thanks for the reference.

Let me give you quick primer on how you could support your news needs.

Let the spider run, either mode-  spider mode or spider search mode.

Obviously depending on your cpu and your bandwidth limit the scope of the crawl somehow. For example if you want stuff about games stuff then don't crawl from Top. As
Top includes Adult, Arts, Business, Computers, Games, etc.

You should get some hits in the hits menu.

Select the hits you are interested in.

Press the reaggregation button (in the hits menu)

Now you have an xml feed you can upload to a server. I then use xslt to transform the feed into html, but you may or may not want to do that.

With your license ie Breeder's Version this process will be more automised but you will have to wait for that funtionality.

Normally it is not such a good idea to crawl from top, as the crawl space is circa one million from Top (80,000 news and blogs sources * N Articles). It is still viable though, except when you start doing stuff like spider searches and start selecting "Search In HTML Body". Remember when you search in html body you are using a full blown spider. Hell why wait for google to take a week to index the web, do it your self!

What I would really like to hear from some people are how to more closely integrate the forum and the application. They are too loosely coupled for my liking and the forum stuff is my technical weak spot.

If you like the app then it might be a good idea to sign up for the forum, that way you will get an email notification when the release version is ready. I am hoping that will be the end of this month.

[Ciinien]

Great, thanks, Kent. Since I am building a gaming site, and BBZ is going to be the site's newsfeed acquisition and reaggregation engine, the tips come in very handy (at the moment I'm using CaRP as a simple display mechanism to make the XML feeds available on the site).

I just need to find more time to experiment with BBZ, as you say--I will make more of an effort to do that here in the next few days. I've kind of gotten side-tracked trying to figure a way to integrate (at least bridge) my current site and WordPress; so far without luck. I know the secret is probably in either the SSI.php or the smf_api.php files, but I'm also still learning PHP. Oh well, I'll get there, it just takes time and patience.

Having said that, and after spending many, many hours surfing the web these last few days researching this and that concerning CMS/Forum-powered and integrated web site tools, I guess I hadn't realized how deeply the 'rabbit hole of technology' had been dug when I took the re...erm, when I decided to unretire and get back into programming...

Cheers!
Ci

[kent]

you wanna to see a deep rabbit hole, bring on xslt.

As it is a declarative language, some stuff we were weaned on, like loops are inherently tricky. For example all loops have to use recusion. All variables are constants, and the list goes on.

I am spoiled now with Java, I never want to go back to c++, urgh that was a nighmare, and at least there is some hope my code will run on other platforms.

[kent]

We are happy to announce the release of the BigBlogZoo Semantic Webkit.

For webmasters out there this tool could help you to gather fresh information for you web pages.

Please note I have taken the beta versions of of the server, you can however download the release version here: http://www.syndicatescape.com/

Thanks to all the forum members who helped me with my queries.