Post-blogging 1940

• • 21 Comments
This post is part of a series post-blogging the Blitz of 1940-41 and the Baedeker Blitz of 1942. See here and here for introductions to the series, and here, here and here for conclusions.

Follow the events of 1940 day by day and week by week, seventy years later:

Airminded - 7 October 1940
Battle of Britain Day by Day - 31 October 1940
Days of Glory - 31 October 1940
Duxford Operations Blog - 31 October 1940
Nick Cooper's Random Blog - 31 October/1 November 1940
Orwell Diaries - 25 October 1940
Spitfire Site - 6 October 1940
World War II Day-By-Day - 31 October 1940
World War II Today - 31 October 1940
WW2: A Civilian in the Second World War - 29 October 1940

@RAFDuxford1940
@ukwarcabinet
@BattleofBritain
1940 Chronicle
Battle of Britain Pilot's Blog

See also: an introduction; and an aggregation blog.

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://airminded.org/copyright/.

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21 thoughts on “Post-blogging 1940”

  1. It is good to see so many people doing his. I think I may have to join. I mean I have just photographed No. 12 Groups ORB so it would seem rude not too;)

    However, unlike the last time I did this I will see it through to the end.

  2.

    It's not easy - try keeping it up (even as very short posts) for eleven-and-a-half months! My own experiment is almost at an end, though I have a few gaps I have to go back and fill to make it the full day-by-day project I originall envisioned.

  3.

    I agree Alan. I failed after about 2 weeks. I can see things getting in the way. You have done a great job to keep it going for so long.

  4.  Post author

    It's definitely hard work, and I admire your dedication, Alan! I think I would probably take a leaf out of your blog and try for shorter posts too -- not try to summarise everything, but try to give a sense of the time and the events. That's probably more appropriate for the Blitz than my approach to the Sudeten crisis anyway, there's not such a strong (and twisting) narrative, it's more about day-to-day endurance.

  6.

    I commend all of you for your post-blogging endeavors. I agree that if the posts are short, and the work shared, then a successful post-blogging effort is possible. Nevertheless, I still think such a project requires a strong commitment.

  7.

    Great idea,

    Does anyone know how to create a page to stream together all these Post-Blogs?

    Happy to host on battleofbritain.tv and share the html for any other sites that want to share the feed... Just wondering how it's done!

    Best regards
    BOB TV

  8.  Post author

    That's a great idea, BOB. In fact it's such a good idea I've stolen it and implemented it here (using FeedWordPress) as a test:

    http://1940.airminded.org/

    I've only added the feeds from Spitfire Site and Airminded for the moment, I'll have to ask the owners of the other sites if they're okay with their posts being aggregated here.

  9.

    Actually I have been prototyping the same thing, but using Yahoo Pipes to aggregate the feeds to a single RSS. Brett, thanks for the plugin tip, I'll try that, too.

    I think that an appropriate way of presenting aggregated results would be title and short excerpt from each post + link to the source. I believe that copyright-wise, everyone should be OK with it.

  10.  Post author

    I'd prefer to do it with excerpts too, but there are two problems. One is that FeedWordPress just takes whatever is in the RSS feed, so if that gives the whole post (as Airminded does, for example) then it will reproduce the whole post. I haven't found a way around that yet. The other problem is that some posts are going to too short to excerpt -- indeed the IWM Duxford blog posts are just one or maybe two lines. So I'd be copying all their content anyway. Besides which, it's polite to ask :)

  12.

    You can truncate the contents of posts by burning each feed in Feedburner, setting the excerpt length there, then aggregating the Feedburner feeds in WP.

  14.  Post author

    Ta, Errol! Fixed.

    Thanks, Robert and Martin. WP Limit Posts Automatically would seem to be ideal, but it doesn't work properly: it has the excerpt alright, but then after that has the entire post (doubling up on the excerpted bit). It's a pretty old plugin, so maybe it needs some PHP tweaking.

    It's worth pointing out that the Duxford Operations Blog has posted its first combat report, and it's more than one sentence long, I'm happy to see :)

  15.  Post author

    Okay, I've worked out the problem with WP Limit Posts Automatically -- there was a clash with FeedWordPress. Telling the latter to expose syndicated posts to formatting filters solved the doubling-up problem.

  17.  Post author

    Yep, Tweet Blender. I like how it has each Twitter account's avatar on each tweet; adds a bit of colour. My only criticism is that it seems hard to slow down how often the widget downloads new tweets; the Twitter API apparently only allows 150 gets per hour per server and if I had many more than 3 accounts on there (or if someone else on my shared webhost was doing something with Twitter) they'd be up to an hour out of date. But even if that happens it's something I can live with.

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  19. Post author

    Okay, seeing as the Battle-specific post-blogs have stopped I'm going to stop updating this post too and unstick it from the front page. Updates will still flow through the aggregator for now.

  20. Rick

    Looking at the memorial to those killed in an air raid show today (09-09-15) reminds me of how my dad said his attitude to the Germans changed. He had joined the Royal Navy in 1938 and when war broke out was not happy about having to "kill Germans", but coming back to his home in the Medway towns on leave, he was redirected when travelling from Liverpool Street to Victoria station because jerry had bombed a children's hospital. He said from that point on he had no qualms.

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