DAGGER 24 Hour News Service

I took some time, a lot of time, trying to set up a similar news delivery service on another hosting platform.  While the host claimed that they were an ad free host, they had a script that would pop up whenever their was a broken link on your site, guess what this script ran...advertising....and lots of it.  No biggy?  Well the script was interfering with the installations which lead to a lot of wasted time and wasted server space.

The server failed on 2 occasions leaving me to wonder if my work had been erased by the server.  No technical assistance or even an FAQ was available.  That's a lot of strikes against it, oh and the name of said host?

ifastnet.com

I won't link to them because they are that bad.  Thanks for wasting my time and the time of hundreds of other webmasters guys.  You really shouldn't have.  There are many other worthless hosts out there and I'll add some more as they come to mind.

We took some time to set up an account over at BlogShares.com and in so doing found some wonderful blogs that deserve attention.  We'll be featuring some of those blogs in future articles but for now we are linking to them on the left hand side of our page. 

If you haven't played BlogShares it's a lot of fun and you can get pretty creative with it.  I'm still learning but have already climbed to the top of the newbie charts in just one day!

If only the money were real...

The rest of the site has been checked for SNAFU's and I realized that posting newsfeeds within a blogpost confuses most feedreaders.  So from now on any javascript newsfeeds must be placed on there own web page and linked to.

I also tried my hand at a new CutePHP application for news and newsfeeds and so far it seems very easy to run.  I'll link to it when it is ready for new members. 

I wanted to display 8 alternative news sources on the same page. I also wanted to include 5 stories from each source and only the titles of each story to be listed.

So, I went to FeedBucket and entered the newsfeeds then copied the coding they provide at the bottom of the page that displays a newsfeed on an HTML page. I copied the coding from there to a new web page and placed each newsfeed in one of eight table cells.

You can see the result here

Basically it is a simple way to make your own newsreader, one that doesn't have unwanted ads or information tracking connected with it.  Go to the link and select view source, select all the information and copy it to your own website.  Just replace the feeds with your own favorites.

We've cleaned up the coding on the home page and blog which means it is now correctly coded in transitional html.  This is important when it comes to search engines properly indexing our results. 

Well we've spent some time programming our radio station for you.  The current playlist includes:

John Scofield, CCR, MMW, Miles Davis, Radiohead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Bill Frisell, Derek Trucks, Alice Donut, Mahavishnu John McLaucghlin, Wilco, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Pearl Jam, Herbie Hancock, Anthony COleman, Garage Mahal, Jarret Churner, Marc Johnson and loads more.

Every day we refine the station a bit more.  If you'd like to suggest some personal favorites please do and we'll add them to the playlist.

Internet Radio is here to stay and we'd like to be a part of it.  If you are listening from other parts of the world we'd love to hear from you too.  Music and musicians can become important ambassadors for music education and culture.  Our station is a tip of the hat to those musicians we feel have made or are making their mark on society at large. 

We've just signed up as a supporter for the ProgressiveStates.org agenda and we've also added them to our short list of Tools & Resources.  The idea is to put in place a Progressive Majority in all 50 states.  There are a lot ways for you to help and you can sign up as an individual supporter.

The site is one of the latest brainstorms of David Sirota, who could be seen as one of today's most dedicated progressive leaders.  You'll find information about and for blogs, legislators, platforms, journalists, and citizens.

Head on over and tell them we sent you.

It's been a busy week here at DAGGER:

1. added news feeds for our top level categories, with some help from tech support, thanks FreeFluxers! 

2. added important resources to our new Tools & Resources section. 

3. began developing our own skin for the site, which we hope to provide back to the FreeFlux community when we are complete.

4. added easy Yahoo and Google buttons so users can add us easily to their feed aggregators.

5. added an Impeach Bush Coalition news ticker.

6. added environmental and political headline pages.

We still need:

1. an editor and more writers

2. more links on other sites and blogs (see our Promote section)

3. suggested news sources for our headlines pages. 

4. audio, video, photos, livebloggers

Have a great Holiday!

Here are some select news feeds from worthy organizations and groups. I'll be including some of the feeds on various pages here soon.  If you'd like us to include your blog's news feed please share it in the comments.

Amnesty International Latest News xml

Greenpeace News feedburner

Worldpress Middle East News feedburner 

The Left Coaster rdf

LabourStart xml

Guardian Unlimited Politics xml

LISNews rss