MpURL and vastly more blogs... - 2 comments

I had a look last night at the updated MpURL resource that is available to all Labour members, to discover that all blogs hosted there offer RSS feeds - I'm sure that facility weren't there before.

We're now running 30 or so of the most active of these blogs (our total is now 440). The problem is that, though the feeds (and previews) are available to the public, and can be read by anyone at B4L, the posts themselves are (by default) only visible to party members with a valid membership login, so non-members will not be able to read the full article, or read selectively from the blog.

Now, Labour's software does provide the ability for these "private" bloggers to make their sites available to the general public, with a friendly URL. Only a handful seem to have done so, and the "public" blogs not only look completely different, but don't indicate the fact that there really is a feed available. If you discovered these facts the wrong way around, as I did, you might be a little confused, but I think I understand now.

What Bloggers4Labour does, therefore, is use the public URL and "private" feed if a public URL is supplied. That should deliver the best of both worlds. Otherwise, we fall back to using the private URL, and in these cases you'll need to log in to view the entirety of a post you've clicked.

There's a huge number of these blogs on the Labour system: a simple calculation suggests over 360. Some will be duplicates of/proxies for blogs we already syndicate, but many/most seem to be the handiwork of blogging newbies, who often wonder if anyone's reading. Hopefully our syndicating them will help.

What I can't explain is that we have a couple of sites with a public URL, but no discernible "private" blog to back them, hence no feed at all. Here are the two blogs in that boat:

• Cllr Matt Cooke
• Anne Snelgrove MP