NewsGator Pro Test

Monday, September 3, 2007

Welcome

This site is a pro-transit blog aggregator. Hopefully folks will be able to use it and suggest blogs that might be a part of this. I'm still working out some of the kinks and if anyone has any suggestions let me know. theoverheadwire at gmail dot com.

A note on the feed: It takes about an hour or so for posts to go up. I don't have control over that so I apologize. I'm also not censoring or screening posts just to let you all know, I like reading all the opinions and realistically there is just too much information to comb through. Some of you have already confessed to this site being a time suck. But that's a good thing!

18 comments:

Julie Fanselow said...

Great idea. Thanks!

I look forward to exploring sites from cities that have MUCH more functional transit than we do here in Boise. I also look forward to networking with transit advocates and users from other cities.

Julie Fanselow
The Boise Bus Blog
www.boisebusblog.com

Matthew Barrett said...

For northern california, check out http://www.mtc.ca.gov/news/headlines.htm and for southern california, check out http://losangelestransportation.blogspot.com

--Matt
Los Angeles Metro Transportation Library

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

Thanks Matt. I've had the LA Transport one up since the start but hadn't seen the MTC one. Thanks for the Tip.

Anonymous said...

We are in a transit crisis in Chicago. Many important bus routes are going to be cut on Sunday, Sept. 16, 2007.

Please encourage your Illinois readers to sign the petition opposing the transit cuts. Perhaps, add a link to our blog.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/makethemwalk
http://makethemwalk.blogspot.com

Nick said...

Should the aggregator be getting all posts to these blogs?

I made one to my blog

http://295bus.blogspot.com/2007/09/does-muni-need-new-control-center.html

and it isn't getting picked up--or does the aggregator just get a selection?

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

Hey 295. It looks like it just picked it up. For some reason it takes about an hour to pull up the RSS feed.

M1EK said...

My most recent post still hasn't showed up - about an hour ago. (I wouldn't be surprised if you had turned me non-automatic given the last two subject lines, but it would be good to know if so).

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

Nope. I don't intend to censor anyone or any thread. The planetizen stream often brings up O'Toole and he's certainly not a supporter.

socialscientist said...

great blog idea - also check out:

http://www.freepublictransit.org

M1EK said...

holy cow

my post about the DOmain ended up with a big table stuck right in the middle of your aggregator. If I did this somehow, I'm sorry; but you'd better take a look... I did have an error in the HTML the first time around; maybe you didn't catch the fixed version?

Pantograph Trolleypole said...

Oops, it's gone now. Sorry I wasn't here to fix it but I'm still in Budapest. Look for a post in TOW soon.

Anonymous said...

This site will come in handy

NAPTA said...

Thanks so much for this! Any chance you could include the ne NAPTA blog at http://napta.blogspot.com/?

M1EK said...

Anybody have a good link to a tutorial on setting up a category-specific RSS field for Movable Type? I'm about to blast the feed with another non-transportation-related article and it's about time I fixed this.

Brandon in California said...

Hey, is this one worthwhile for your aggregator?

California Transportation & Transit Issues
http://farleysays.blogspot.com/

Okay, I admit it. I am pimping my own.

Brandon

Nick said...

I finally figured out why sometimes my posts don't show up here--Blogspot timestamps posts for the first time you *save* them, not for the actual publishing time.

So if you start writing a post in blogger, save it without publishing. come back two days later, wrap it up and push it out--it will already officially be 48 hours old--and it'll be outside of the aggregators window of "recent posts".

Probably the best thing to do is write up your posts offline, and only stick them into blogger at the last minute.

There are other advantages of this like the fact that you'll end up making an offline archive. The main downside I can see is that you either have to insert pictures at the last minute, or else host them somewhere other than blogger (I use Google's "my account"/"page creator" as a handy place to stash pictures sometimes).

Editing posts offline also makes it easier to have someone else proofread them, always a good idea anyway!

accountablevta said...

Is it possible to include VTA Watch: http://vtawatch.blogspot.com/index.html

Nick said...

Hey Pan, I'd like to second the nomination for vtawatch.blogspot.com. It would be great to get the South Bay Area represented here.

Transit Advocate Blog Aggregator