Mike Griffiths

So I’ve owned Linux Portal for as long as I can remember, but not really done much with it. Originally I created it to aggregate some of my favourite Linux RSS feeds from the sites I read the most, but it became a bit of an effort to maintain for something that had very little rewards, because of that I just left it with some RSS feeds with links to the articles on the home page. Nothing new and nothing interesting.

I recently decided to update it though. A similar principle but putting the sturdiness of WordPress to good use. I now use some of those same feeds that I used originally to pull in the articles. I then publish those articles to the blog as posts, all on-the-fly, and totally automated. I update the blog about once a week and it will grab new posts from the feed and publish them.

There were some initial teething problems though. I had ‘Post-to-twitter’ plug-in along with the Google Sitemap generator plug-in both running at the same time. So, when I added a new feed it would pull in around 50 posts. That meant grabbing all 50 posts from the source, then posting 50 new messages to Twitter (in quick succession), and on each post it would generate a new sitemap.xml, update robots.txt and notify 5 search engines of the change. Quite a massive task for one webserver really. Inevitably, the server came to a standstill every time. I’ve since solved it by disabling the plug-ins but if the site takes off I might create a cron job that checks for updates and then notifies Twitter and the sitemap plug-in to run periodically.

If you’re interested check the site out, there are Linux Articles and Linux News.

Enjoy