Last July, we posted a prototype Web application, RSS Mixer that allowed anonymous visitors to mix RSS (and Atom) feeds together. Back then the page got a lot of notice. There was a blog post from Mashable, one from CNET’s Webware, a brief article in Brazil’s largest newspaper, and literally hundreds of other links from all over the world. The prototype site continues to get traffic and it will surpass 5,000 user-generated mixes and added 10,000 feeds any day now.

Next month, we’ll be releasing a new version of RSS Mixer. The alpha version will still allow for anonymous mixing, but registered (free) users will be able save and edit their mixes. A new and vastly improved feed mixer will update RSS and Atom feeds quickly, pulling images and other rich media. A number of other improvements including enhanced language support, full search, tagging, feed statistics and ranking, and many others will all be part of the package. We will announce the release date in early February.  Update: We will be releasing the new version of RSS Mixer this summer.

We’ve just completed a series of changes to the ExhibitFiles website including: improved “member contacts,” better commenting, and enhanced member profiles. It’s now possible to include blog feeds and flickr thumbnails in your profile. You can see mine here, or click below.

Along with improvements to profiles and commenting, a new search feature was developed. While the ExhibitFiles is only a couple of months old, there are already over 40 case studies and reviews and more than 200 members. Finding the right exhibit or a colleague’s profile was becoming increasingly difficult. The new search feature allows you to conduct a full-text search or you can click on a topic, institution, or individual in a case study or review to bring back results. For example, clicking an exhibit focus such as “Science” brings back the 15 records that share that focus.

We’re still fine tuning the search feature, but we hope this and other new features will help the ExhibitFiles continue to grow and make it even easier to use.

We finally carved out the time to make some very necessary changes to the Museum Blogs directory and aggregator. The site is a customized WordPress application with quite a bit of additional coding to make it all work. We’ve added pagination, integrated a Google Co-op search, and we have greatly improved the “auto aggregator.” The site now can handle RSS 1.0 and 2.0, along with Atom syndication. This major improvement in syndication has increased the number of posts in the site, there are now nearly 10,000. That means there are nearly 10,000 links to other museum blogs! We hope that this helps improve the authority of the all of the 118 blogs in the site. Afterall, that’s why we built the directory last May.

With 113 museum blogs now listed in the MuseumBlogs directory we’ve thinking about the next steps for the site. It is in need of a redesign to accomodate the large number of blogs that have been added recently, there were only around 30 when it launched early last summer. Since this is an “unfunded” project, we don’t always the time we’d like to work on it. As part of redesign, a simple tool we’ve been experimenting with is Google Custom Search Engines, known as Google Co-op (Beta, of course).

We’ve created a museum blog co-op that does a pretty good job of searching the 113 blogs listed in the directory. You can try it out right here. (Updated: 2-5-07)

There is also a page for Museum Blogs on Google itself. This co-op doesn’t allow other contributors (although you can always add your site to Museum Blogs). Seems like there’s a lot of potential here for museums and others. If you want to add the code to search Museums Blogs from your own, it’s below.

<!– Google CSE Search Box Begins –></p> <div id=”mbwidget_xyz” style=”background:url(http://www.museumblogs.org/widget/widgetback.gif) no-repeat top center;width:140px;height:126px;padding:0;margin:0″> <div id=”mblogo_xyz” style=”padding: 7px 0 0 5px;”><p><a href=”http://www.museumblogs.org/”><img src=”http://www.museumblogs.org/widget/widgetlogo.gif” border=”none” /></a></div> <div id=”mbsearchbox_xyz”> <form id=”searchbox_003685806325505846693:kjx1pf1zo-e” action=”http://www.google.com/cse” style=”padding:0;margin:0;”> <input name=”q” type=”text” style=”width:120px;font: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;margin:5px 10px 0px 7px;border:1px solid #a4a4a4;”></input> <div style=”font: 9px/10px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;padding:0px 10px 0px 10px;”><p>Google Custom Search</p></div> <input type=”submit” name=”sa” value=”Search” style=”width:50px;font: 9px Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;margin:10px;float:right”></input> <input type=”hidden” value=”FORID:1″ name=”cof”></input> <input type=”hidden” value=”003685806325505846693:kjx1pf1zo-e” name=”cx”></input> </form> </div> </div> <p><!– Google CSE Search Box Ends –>