Geeklog Forums

I did a little snooping but didn't see a post that directly addresses what I'm after.

I really want to have a page of blocks (like a portal site such as iGoogle). For now it would just show all of the RSS blocks I've created that are bloating my right and left columns.

Of course to be really useful they'd all have to be AJAX'd so the page itself doesn't take a gazzilion years to load.

This post looks for creating an RSS static page, but we already have RSS reading libraries in GL that I want to appear in the same page.
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=66832

Any thoughts?

Here are some related posts:
Chatterblock static page?
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=56245

GL-Friendly feed aggregator?
http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=62592

The chatterblock option is more what I'm after. But, that is for a third party block. How do I access the Portal Block functions within GL itself?

In the blocks section, disable the blocks you want to include on the static page but don't want on you left/right columns. Don't delete them, just disable them.

In your staticpage do something like this:
How you generate your list of bids is up to you.

Hmm. Looks easy. Here is the results of my first try. My DB has portal blocks with BIDs from 16 to 23. All are disabled.

So I put the following into a static page and tried the page with both "Execute PHP" and "Execute PHP(return)" options selected in the static page editor.



I got the following,

An SQL error has occurred. Please see error.log for details.


Here is the error log entry

I'll add this to this thread: I had to disable the blocks earlier because they were dragging down the rendering of the whole homepage. It was taking nearly a minute (I was surprised PHP or my browser didn't time out). This makes perfect sense: I had like 6 portal blocks all trying to update and waiting for their feeds to finish before the whole page on my end would render.

Of course what is really needed is to make blocks be AJAX'd so they load independently of the page a la iGoogle.

But until then I could live with forcing the blocks to load only say once an hour, and then I'll ping the site every so often with a wget request to force update them to not penalize users.

Question is: how do I tune how often the blocks update? I can only find this post which no one responded to.

http://www.geeklog.net/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=42610

Thoughts?

You need to add global $_TABLES; to the beginning of your static page source. I didn't say my solution was complete. I said try something like this.

Likewise it says "return /* or echo */" because I didn't know if you were using "Execute PHP" or "Execute PHP (return)". If return, then you can remove the "or echo" and vice versa.

If you need more explicit instructions, let me know and I'll actually try to do this on a running copy of Geeklog.

Oh, sorry. Clearly I'm not coder.

Could you please provide a complete example?

Create a static page with Execute PHP (return) type. You probably want to turn off putting the page inside a block as well.

Alternatively, you might make sure all the blocks have a similar name (not title) such as portal_1, portal_2, portal_3, etc. Then you could use this sql:

Thank you so much.

I used your last option and it worked like a champ... except with 2 feeds the page takes about 30 seconds to load.

With 6 feeds you have to go get a cup of coffee.