Urban Yukon BlogUrban Yukon news and announcements

It’s not just you. I’ve noticed the same for a while, and recently Urban Yukon has become positively sluggish in listing new posts, sometimes taking many hours before updating.

I don’t have any hard numbers, but if there is a slowdown, it’s likely due to the Feed Informer service that provides the list of postings on UY’s home page. Feed Informer has been mostly reliable, but occasionally hiccups and displays nothing at all on the UY page. (When that happens, try refreshing your browser.) Of course, for the price of exactly zero clams, I have no real complaints with the service.

But Feed Informer’s days are numbered anyway, as I have to replace it with custom code to enable the promised new features. My goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, with no interruptions to the flow of postings. Once the new platform is in place, I expect to have a method to pick up new posts the instant that they are published.

Urban Yukon postings have been on a tear lately. I don’t have exact numbers, but we seem to be averaging at least twenty new posts per day. Our dark season likely has something to do with the prolific outpourings.

We also have a few new members. I’ll be welcoming them here shortly. Please visit and comment; both new and established bloggers appreciate — and secretly crave — feedback.

At least a couple of UY blogs have been nominated for the Canadian Blog Awards. Please vote for your favourite personal or family blogs (hint: “possessive” blogs that start with F or M). Results will be posted on December 12th.

It’s taken me a while to figure out how best to add the most requested features from the recent UY poll. In short, there will be some programming involved, but that’s fine by me. The features that I’ll tackle first will be:

• Gather together multiple recent posts by a single author so that they don’t crowd out other postings.
• Ability to view older blog postings than just those shown on the front page.
• Search that can find matches in posting contents.
• Categories for member blogs (e.g., business, techie, family, news).
• “Identicons” alongside postings to highlight the author

The first three have become ever more important, what with the growth in posting frequency of late.

I’ll be introducing the changes gradually, at a different URL so that interested folks can try them out before the changes are promoted to the “live” site. I also think that most of us appreciate the basic way that Geof organized UY, and I don’t want to mess with that successful formula.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.

The last step in the transfer of Urban Yukon from Geof to me will take place within a few days as the domain name ownership changes hands. In theory, there should be no visible effect. In practice, however…

Update: the transfer completed successfully on October 25th with an apparent lack of haywireness.

Update: Leonie’s blog is now at this address: http://leonieklemphers.blogspot.com/

As you may have read, Geof asked someone to take over hosting and maintenance of the Urban Yukon site. I volunteered, and now the site runs from my web service.

My name is Dave Rogers, and I write the What He Said blog, a member of Urban Yukon for a couple of years now. I run a one-man computer programming business, when I’m not somehow occupied with the College (new site — check it out).

I had a few changes in mind for Urban Yukon, but I think the site really belongs to its bloggers, and so I’m asking for suggestions that I can hopefully implement. Although, while I’m pretty good at the background coding of websites, I’m not much of a graphic designer, so I’ll need help for that.

This blog is the first of my changes: something to spread the word about the Urban Yukon community of bloggers. Changes to the site, coming meetups for fellow-bloggers, and new member announcements will be posted here.

And many thanks to Geof from all of us for starting Urban Yukon in the first place and encouraging blogging in, and about, our glorious territory.

Please send all questions, comments, suggestions, and concerns to: urbanyukon strudel yukondude full-stop com.