Updates to ausGLAMblogs

27 March 2016

I spent the last couple of days making some updates to ausGLAMblogs.

Admin area

Just like when I first turned the original nodejs code into a Meteor app, most of the work I did will only be seen by a couple of people. I made some changes to the way the admin section works, so that:

  • admins can now simply enter the URL of a blog to delete it from the list (previously the only way to do it was to re-register it then reject the registration).
  • admins can reject updated/additional registration attempts without deleting the original listing
  • admins are emailed when an admin is added, deleted, or changed to owner (there can be one 'owner' and only they can add, delete or make someone else an admin)

When a blog is registered, every admin is emailed. The listing now goes into a collection called UnapprovedBlogs, and appears in the admin page as you can see above. We can then either Reject, in which case the entry is simply deleted, or Approve, in which case it is added to the Blogs collection, which is the one the rest of the app looks at. Previously everything just went straight to the Blogs collection, but when it was approved the 'approved' field was changed from false to true. The problem with doing it that way was that if someone wanted to update their blog listing, or someone tried to register one again, but with incorrect or incomplete details, the original listing was overwritten - oops! That's now fixed.

Blog listing

There are also some nice fixes here:

  • the blog listing now refers to 'Address' not 'Feed' (thanks to Phil Minchin for picking this up - it was a hangover from a very early version)
  • I fixed a bug with registering museums-related blogs (they were registered as Archives blogs instead)
  • address and twitter in listings are now links, and I cleaned up the addresses to make them prettier
  • the entire list can now be downloaded as an OPML file

The OPML file is probably the most important addition from a general user point of view. I've tested it using Vienna and it seems to work correctly, but please let me know if it doesn't work for you. This file doesn't exist until you press the button, so it will always be up to date.

Code

I've moved the code to GitHub, and renamed it CommunityTweets.