List Blog Prototype Mania is sucking up everything into its vortex like an Oklahoma Tornado. The Wizard set me up with a site on his personal server to house the Daily News List prototype site at http://csnews.csmvps.com. Here's a screenshot. (Click to enlarge.)
I used my sweet Migration Utility to enter the Daily News in its entirety into the List Blog. I entered them month-by-month, with each month taking around ten minutes for processing. I only tagged about 3 days worth of individual news items though. This is going to be a lot of data, folks. The last six months of Daily News created over 1800 news items (posts) in the List Blog. Wow.
My personal reaction to using the Daily News List blog is that I love the Tag Cloud and seeing every news item as a separate post, each with its own permalink. Searching is going to be great. Check out the search on "anonymous user" for example. It gives you an idea of focused yet diverse information returned on a given topic. I've mentioned before that I search the Daily News ALL THE TIME and I am going to love searching the List Blog to retrieve individual posts. It will be much more efficient.
RSS is great. Each topic is displayed in a tight list. Plus, with tagging, that's going to be some considerable syndicated granularity. J-O Eriksson, for instance, one of the global stars of the DN can create a "J-O Eriksson" feed and be informed of news items covering his work to make sure I'm covering the story thoroughly enough and getting it right.
One final aspect of the List blog is that each item published with the Blog Migrator retains the published date of the original Daily News post so we have a date context for each archived news item.
I've been learning a few things about the conversion process, the main thing is to stay out of TinyMCE and the Community Server Post Editor as much as humanly possible. The prospect of working through hundreds of posts, having to set the published/non-published filter and grid page on each load is ridiculous. Of course, it was never designed for that kind of post handling. So what I did was to make the publish bit an option (set in resources.xml), so when Daily News issues are converted to individual List posts they are immediately published. The List Builder does a great job converting each item and they have required almost no editing, so I can use the sweet inline tag editor for tagging. Definitely a timesaver.
There's one fly in the Prototype Celebration Cake's Icing though. I hadn't considered trackbacks when publishing the individual posts. The good news is that a lot of people are now learning about the Daily News List Blog. The bad news is that CSNews.csmvps.com is a temporary domain for the prototype. That was the plan anyway.
Please visit the site and subscribe to the feed if you would. Let me know if you have any ideas for improvement. I already received good input from Keyvan who mentioned that browsing by tag displays post excerpts, and since the posts are so short the full post should be displayed. Will do!
Let the Community Server Daily News List Prototype Mania begin!