Since the demise of ORblogs, several Oregon blog aggregators have come, and gone. None of the survivors quite live up to ORblog’s legacy, but several are making a valiant effort.
I’ve aggregated the aggregators below, with brief reviews:
Probably the most comprehensive of the new Oregon blog aggregators, ignOregon is simple to navigate and makes it easy to add your own blog. Like ORblogs before it, the number of clicks a post receives is recorded, the most popular posts are highlighted in the sidebar, and you can peruse by blog city. There’s no registration requirement.
ORegon Blogs never quite lived up to its promise as a potential replacement for the original ORblogs. Frankly, the site appears to be abandoned, only limping along with posts from a handful of blogs, and vague about its mission (the About page calls it a political Web site, but there’s no indication of that elsewhere on the site). And I get an Apache error when I attempt to submit my Feedburner RSS feed 🙁
Portland Things (portlandthings.com)
Portland Things is simple – no voting up or down, no recording of clicks. But it’s nice looking, and easy to use. Blogs are submitted using a form, and are listed by general topic (e.g. tech, cycling, food) on the homepage sidebar. Aggregated blog posts from Portland blogs are displayed on the homepage with blog post title, blog name, and a short excerpt. This is my favorite of the aggregators. Simplicity is sometimes best.
Bend Blogs, naturally, focuses on content from and about Central Oregon. In addition to the chronological aggregation on the homepage, it’s searchable, or you can explore by tags. A convenient list of the aggregated blogs and their RSS feeds appears in the sidebar.
For a “temporary” replacement for ORBlogs, IGNOregon is doing a smashing job. They deserve a whole lot of credit.
As far as ORBlogs.org goes, I was wondering about that. I was worried that I was the only blogger getting that message. Sad to see it’s kind of gone inactive. Looked like it had much promise.
Thanks to you, I found Portland Things, and I hope they add my blog, because I just submitted it. You’re right – nice, clean, simple design. We sometimes forget that just enough is sometimes more than good enough.