1

What is the Aggregator?

The aggregator collects the posts of blogs in its database, and puts them together chronologically. This way it makes it easier to read hundreds of blogs, and also highlights other blogs that you might have missed.

2

Who runs the Aggregator?

The site is run/designed by me, Ryan Cullen. I was a councillor on Lincoln City Council, and previously worked for the Liberal Democrat Youth and Students. I studied Computer Science at Warwick University and now spend most of my spare time making websites.

3

How can I add my site to the Aggregator?

Visit this page.

4

Why's my blog post not there?

Is your name in italics in the list of contributors?
Then there is a problem with your XML feed and we are unable to read it.
Have you posted in the last 2 days?
To save space, we only show posts from the last 2 days, however you should find your post in the archive.
Have you posted more than 20 posts in the last 2 days?
Again to save space, on the main page we only show up to 20 posts per person.
Did you only just post it?
To save on bandwidth, we only check the feeds every half hour.
Does your post have a title?
Posts without titles are ignored by the aggregator.
Is this your first post in a while?
We remove blogs from both the Aggregator which haven't had a post in the last 60 days, please let if you want us to reactivate your blog.
Do you use a third party to run your RSS feeds?
Feedburner are pretty bad at presenting the most recent posts to LibDemBlogs (and other aggregator websites), the feed they give can be up to 3 days old, which may mean your posts wont appear.
You can either moan at Feeburner, or go back to allowing your blogging software/hosts to doing the RSS feeds.
I've checked everything above, and I still don't appear!
Just send an email to and I'll try to look into it ASAP for you.

5

Hmm, what's this Mute all about

One of the most frequently asked features to LibDemBlogs was to hide/create a customer lists of blogs.
As I love the fact that new bloggers get instant exposure, I wasn't willing to allow people to just pick a few blogs (anyways that's what Google Reader is for). With the major recode that took place, I've been able to add a Mute feature.
By clicking on Mute under a blog post you can hide all the posts from that blog.
The muting is done via a cookie, so if you don't have them enabled, next time you come back all the post will be shown again.
As the cookie is stored on the computer, the mute settings won't follow you to another computer.
You can see which users you have muted, by looking for the people in bold and red under the list of contributers. To unmute them, just click on their name.
No stats are collected on which users are muted, so don't worry I won't be knocking on your doors when you mute my own blog.
Search engines will still see all the posts, and they will all appear in the archives.

6

The site hasn't updated for hours

First trying press Ctrl+F5, your browser may have cached an old version.
If that's still not worked it might be because the problem with trying to read hundreds of blogs every thirty minutes is that if suddenly a few site go down, it can take LibDemBlogs with it.
Hopefully my server should have emailed me to say that there is a fault, and I should be working on it already, but feel free to send me a just incase.

7

How do I get that small picture next to my posts?

The small picture is a Gravatar, it's used on many blogs comment functions and is a great way to personalise your posts. The first step is to sign up to Gravatar with an email address and the second is to let the email address that you've used. As long as it's rated either a PG or G it'll appear next to your posts.

8

Where has the formatting in my post gone?

Several reasons, LibDemBlogs has a white background, so if you have told your dark blog to have some white text it wouldn't show up here. Also the aggregator trims all the posts so that they are no more than 100 words long. To ensure that we don't have any stray, unclosed tags, we remove them all.

9

You still have a post I deleted in the archive

The archive is a snap shot of the day at midnight, this means if you deleted a post a few days later it will remain in the archive.
If you wish for me to remove it, please , and I'll manually remove the post.

10

My post didn't appear in the archive

The archive page is generated a midnight each day. If you retrospectively posted, then the software would have missed it. Also if your blog was down at midnight it would have not been possible for the aggregator to read your site.

11

When I visit LibDemBlogs on my mobile you crash my phone

The HTML of the main page is massive, this is why I have created a nice trimmed down version of the site for your mobile phone, which can be found at m.libdemblogs.co.uk