Because many of Kinja’s users are getting their feet wet in the blogging world, they neither need, nor are expected to have, any knowledge of the behind-the-scenes how-tos. Users add new sites using the regular URL, at which point, “it is queued for parsing.” Hamer says. “We don’t require our users to find, understand, or enter the URL of the Weblog’s feed, if it is available at all. Our crawler respects the robots exclusion protocol, so if it is allowed, we attempt to find posts and permalinks by parsing HTML.” If an HTML parse is unsuccessful, Kinja automatically reverts to other sources, such as Atom or RSS feeds. “A cleaned excerpt of each post is stored in our system for digest display,” according to Hamer. “After a Weblog is added to the system, it is visited periodically at a frequency based on the actual number of posts found. All the Weblogs in Kinja have been added to digests by users.
EContent Magazine profiles Kinja
Kinley Levack profiled Nick Denton’s Kinja.com in the October issue of EContent Magazine. Product Manager Matt Hamer provides some behind-the-scenes insights into Kinja.