Introduction…
“HotStuff 2.0″ is an automatically updated blog developed by Dave Pattern (Library Systems Manager, University of Huddersfield, UK).
RSS feeds from over 800 library related blogs are collated on a daily basis and analysed in an attempt to discover new and/or interesting topics. Not all of the blogs have posted something new since HotStuff was launched, so the number of active blogs is lower.
A daily blog post is generated using a single word that has seen a marked increase in usage over the last few days. A “Word Wheel” image shows the strength of the links between that word and other words that have also recently seen an increase in usage. This can sometimes help to put to the words into context, but mostly it’s just an excuse for some eye candy!
At present, RSS feeds from the blogs are fetched and processed every 4 hours.
Hot or Not?
Just for fun, every day the last 3 blog posts from each blog are analysed to give a “Hot or Not” score. Points are gained for using words that haven’t been used frequently in the past, but lost for using words that are declining in popularity. You can see the current scores on the Hot or Not page!
Blog Widgets
If you’d like to embed some of the functionality into your own blog or web page, see the widgets page for more info.
Techie Stuff…
The HotStuff code is written in Perl, with a little bit of PHP, and uses a MySQL database to store the details of blog posts and words used. The code makes use of the Bloglines API to fetch new blog posts. Many thanks to the authors of the following Perl modules for making life easier: WebService-Bloglines, WordPress-API, XML-XPath, and PerlMagick.
Add Your Blog…
If you would like your blog adding to the list, please submit the URL.
Your blog should be relevant to libraries, librarians or people with an interest in the library world. For example, the following are currently included…
- blogs written by a librarian, library staff or someone studying to be a librarian
- blogs containing content that is likely to be of interest to libraries and/or library staff