News blogs now on mobile

The old look and the new look on a mobile...

My news blogs now detect if you are using a mobile phone to browse, and the blogs are automatically reformatted to show properly and readable on a small screen.

Check out AidNews, AidResources, News On Green, AidBlogs, The NonProfit Blogs, Blogging Today and The Weird Bit on your mobile!

And no, "The Road to the Horizon" is not one of them. Poor old Blogger lags behind on mobile support. One day...!

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Introducing three new blogs

To start the year on a good footing, I am redoing a number of my blogs. Several of them used to be hosted on Tumblr. Unfortunately Tumblr is losing its edge, so I am now migrating them in WordPress, hosted to my own server.

1. The Weird Bit is the new format for my aggregator of weird and offbeat news. A bit of fun in this world of continuing bad news... The updates are tweeted via @TheWeirdBit. Oh, and I also migrated over about 20,000 blogposts from the old blog.
2. Aid Resources aggregates the latest articles from a large number of sites with reference articles in the aid and humanitarian world. Updates via Twitter on @AidResources (used to be @ChangeThruInfo). I moved over 40,000 posts from its old blog home.
3. News On Green collects the latest blogs and articles on the environment, climate change and nature conservation. Tweeted via @NewsOnGreen. I migrated 86,000 articles from the past 28 months on this new blog.

Each of the blogs have a faster aggregator, a better search mechanism, an improved RSS generator and an easy way for people to subscribe by Email for automated updates.

I am still fine-tuning the layout. If the new blog-hosting works out OK, I will move over the remaining blogs one by one.

Check out my full bloglist.

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Humanitarian News moved to a new server

Those of you following my different blogs, will have noticed I have been struggling with GoDaddy, the hosting service for some sites since the longest time.

After months of virus infections on some sites, security failures, lack of performance and repeated downtime, I decided to move some of my blogs to another host.

The first, and most complex of all sites, Humanitarian News, was the first one to move. Since I started Humanitarian News, the site had completely outgrown its server: We have now collected and indexed close to 300,000 news articles and blogs on nonprofit topics. The site now gets 20,000 visitors per month, with sometimes over 40 simultaneous users.

With the help of Fabio and Andrea, two Linux/PHP/MySQL/CSS/Drupal gurus, we move Humanitarian News to its new server over the weekend. Something I wanted to do since months, but never had the time, and certainly didn't have the knowledge. So now, the deed is done: Humanitarian News has moved, and is purring on the new server, happy like a cat next to a stove. The response time is much better than ever before.

While moving, we implemented a new search engine (called "SOLR", for the nerds amongst you), which indexes all posts much faster, and generates search results in a flash.

What is even more important: we enable the customized RSS feeds once again. This is a powerful feature which allows visitors to create their own RSS feed, out of any search criteria.
For instance, if you are interested in the latest on the Pakistan floods, the search will give you these results. Clicking on the RSS icon next to the search bar will generate this feed.

Once you generated a feed, you can import it in your RSS reader, display it on a widget on your blog, or even generate a daily email with the latest articles on that topic.

As Humanitarian News monitors and collects articles from 1,000+ different websites, the customized RSS feeds give you an instantaneous overview of the latest articles on your favourite topics, from pretty much the "cream" of all nonprofit news/blog sources.

Next steps will be to move Have Impact and BlogTips to the new server.

Enjoy!

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Blogroll: Aid Blogs

Updated January 1, 2012

Blogs by colleagues and aidworkers all over the world.

No time to read it all? Check their latest posts in AidBlogs.

Across the Divide (World)
Advice Worth 500 Sheep (Iraq)
After Africa (Denmark)
Aidworker (Senegal)
Aid Worker Daily
Alpha Bah"
Baby Catching (Ghana)
Body in Motion (Malawi)
Captain Cat's Diaries (Afghanistan)
Cashew Man (Canada/Ethiopia)
Chasing Carly (Lebanon)
Chhaya Path (Kenya)
Concrete & Barbed Wire (Afghanistan)
Deep South Sudan
Ending Extreme Poverty (DRC)
The Faders in Sudan
From Congo (DRC)
From Here to Finvara (South Sudan)
Globetrotter Mats (World)
Habib Malik (UK)
Harry Rud (Afghanistan/UK)
Hand Relief International
Head Down Eyes Open (Geneva)
A Humourless Lot (World)
In Development
Innovations with Farmers (Ghana)
Itinerant and Indigent (Afghanistan)
Laurenist
Let Them Have Faces (DC)
Letters From Malawi
Live in Luanda (Angola)
Louder than Swahili (Tanzania)
Mangham Mayhem (Mongolia)
Marge in the field (Chad)
Martyns in Africa (Sudan)
MeriGoesAround (Benin)
My passion is for the people (Kenya)
Nathalie Abejero (Cambodia)
A New Map of the World (DC)
On My Way (Ghana)
Our Man in Hanoi
Owen Abroad (Ethiopia)
Paradox Uganda
Penelope MC (Canada)
The Perpetual Bloom (Sri Lanka)
Pyjama Samsara (Cambodia)
Rachel in Erbil (Iraq)
Rob Rooker (Sudan)
Roving Bandit (South Sudan)
Shotgunshack (World)
Street kids in Vietnam
Sudan Stories (now Haiti)
The Road to the Horizon (World)
The Signs Along The Road (World)
Straight out of the Jungle (World)
Stuff Expat Aidworkers Like
Tales of Life in Mozambique
Tales from the hood (Thailand)
The Uncultured Project (Bangladesh)
Underwater Desert (Somalia)
A View from the Cave
Voice in the Desert (Burkina Faso)
Under the mosquito net (Kenya)
Voyageuse Mondiale (Tajikistan)
Wanderlust
Where in the World? (Ghana)



Retired but still interesting aidblogs here

Do you have other interesting blogs to add? Let me know!

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Newly found aidworker blogs

I cleaned up my list of aidworkers' blogroll in the sidecolumn. Blogs with irregular updates and those from aidworkers who moved on, I moved to the archive.

I also added my latest aidworker blog finds:

• Habib Malik from the UK, who travels around the world for Islamic Relief. 
• Sudan Stories, by Ali who actually just moved to Haiti. 
• My passion is for the people is a blog by Meghan in Kenya 
• Wander Everywhere follows the travels of aidworker Caitlin

I also updated the bloglist for AidBlogs where I aggregate the posts on each of these blogs.

While I cleaned up the blogs, I continuously got distracted by browsing through them. I should say, anyone wondering if aidwork is something for them, should read through those blogs. They give the best peep one can get into the daily life of a humanitarian in the field. With the joys, frustrations, surprises, doubts, anger, sadness and dumbness we are often confronted with.

Enjoy!

Picture courtesy Sudan Stories

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Two new websites. Something I wanted to do for the longest time

For ages, I have been looking for a way to get an easy and flexible overview of the latest articles for all the news sites I am monitoring. I gave it a try with NewsFeeds, which runs on Google Sites. Unfortunately it was not fast enough for my purpose, so I decided to redo it. And I wanted to style it in the way PopURL does it: plain and simple, the latest 10 posts. And if you hover over an article, a balloon pops up with the first lines of the article and the time it was posted. Click on an article and the original opens up in a new window...

I think I found the final solution: Have a look on My Home on the Road. Pretty neat, even though I say so myself.



On the home page, I give an overview of the latest posts for all the sites I manage. Subsequent pages give an overview of the latest news in the western press, the world press, magazines and social media sites. I also added topic pages. One has a Google News filter for humanitarian topics, a page with technology sites, one with odd news and the last one shows the latest news in the places I live (Belgium and Italy).

For the geeks amongst you: the site runs on selfhosted WordPress, and uses a triple caching mechanism: one to cache the feeds, one to cache the SQL database queries and one to cache the HTML.

If you have suggestions for any sites I should add, let me know.

Yet another thing I wanted to do since the longest time, is to gather all noteworthy stuff I have written, stories and articles, in one place. Their new home is Scribbles. Most of them have been published on The Road before, but I intend to add stuff I wrote a long time before the Internet came into being.

In case you loose track of all blogs and sites I manage, here is an overview.

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My blogs

I blog for fun and out of passion. I love social media and the power of crowdsourced information gathering or dissemination. Here is a short overview of all my blogs and websites:

1. My main blogs

• My House on The Road
  ...is really my home page. It shows the latest feeds from all my sites, as well as the feeds from a selection of other news sites I follow constantly.
  
  
• The Road to the Horizon
  ... is my main blog. This is where it all started. On "The Road" I publish my travel short stories, news commentary, bits and pieces of things I pick up as I live my life as an expat, a traveller, and an aidworker.
  On Twitter: @TheRoadTo
  On Facebook: TheRoadToTheHorizon
  
  
• BlogTips
  ...pulls together all my tips on blogging, specifically as tips and tricks for nonprofit bloggers and nonprofit organisations.
  On Twitter: @BloggerTip
  
  
• Shot from the Hip
  ...is where I post random pictures taken with my mobile phone. Life around me
  automatically twittered via @TheRoadTo
  
  
• Scribbles
  ...is a spin-off from The Road, where I highlight my "most notorious" writings: articles and stories I wrote over the years.
  
  
• Have Impact!
  ...concentrates on our micro finance projects, which originally started as a social project "Change Starts Here" on The Road
  
  
• Verslaafd aan de Horizon
  ...is my Dutch eBook about three expeditions to the Antarctic and the Pacific.
  
  
• The Non-Profit Press
  ...publishes press releases and news from nonprofit causes.
  
  

2. My news aggregators

• Humanitarian News
  ...is my mega-collector of the latest posts and publications from the nonprofit sector. Over 800 different sources get polled, posts are summarized an put in different categories. The site is searchable, and features individual feeds for the different news categories.
  On Twitter: @HumanityNews
  (or @HumanityNews2 for max. 2 Tweets per hour)
  On Facebook: HumanitarianNews
  
  On Twitter: @AidNews
  (or @AidNews2 for max. 2 Tweets per hour)
  On Facebook: AidNews
  
  On Twitter: @NewsOnGreen
  (or @NewsOnGreen2 for max. 2 Tweets per hour)
  On Facebook: NewsOnGreen
  
  On Twitter: @AidResources
  (or @AidResources2 for max. 2 Tweets per hour)
  On Facebook: AidResources
  
  On Twitter: @NonProfitBlogs
  (or @NonProfitBlogs2 for max. 2 Tweets per hour)
  On Facebook: NonProfitBlogs
  
  On Twitter: @AidBlogs
  
  
• AidJobs
  ...collects the latest job vacancies in the nonprofit sector.
  On Twitter: @AidJobs
  On Facebook: AidJobs
  
  

3. Web clippings

• The Horizon
  ...is where I collect my random Internet clips, as I browse around the Internet.
  
  
• The Road Daily
  ...is a Newsvine site, where I clip news articles. Articles can be commented upon.
  
  
• International Aid Workers Today
  ...is similar to "The Road Daily", but here a community of people interested in humanitarian aid submit their clips.
  
  

4. Experimental blogs

• Ander Nieuws
  ...is the same as "The Other World News", but with Dutch headers.
  
  
• De weg naar de Horizon
  ...is another Dutch site where I cross-post short pieces from The Road to the Horizon.
  
  

Pictures courtesy Ning and RSA Education

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