About

Laplap is a Vanuatu blog aggregator. It is named after a popular, baked delicacy scraped from the manioc, taro, yam or banana. In the same way, Laplap takes hundreds of blog feeds and ’scrapes’ them into one metablog. It also pulls in the latest Vanuatu photos from Flickr through the magic of XML. All in all, Laplap hopes to give you a snapshot of the Vanuatu blogosphere. All the blogs on Laplap are either from Vanuatu or cover Vanuatu issues. There is a more detailed policy available at right. Laplap was founded to highlight the culture and views of the Ni-Van people. The site is based on a similar initiative in Sri Lanka, www.kottu.org. The original design is by Indi Samarajiva and we thank and value his permission to replicate the project here in Vanuatu. Laplap is not edited beyond preventing posts from breaking the layout. All opinions and copyrights and whatever belong to the blog authors.

Policy

The basic policy to join Laplap is simple, be a Vanuatu blogger or cover Vanuatu issues. Laplap is designed for blogs, but any frequently updated site with a feed would do. More specifically,

1. You must have a valid feed (RSS, Atom). Every modern blogging tool has one automatically
2. The feed must not break Laplap
3. You are in Vanuatu or cover Vanuatu issues
4. You write original content (not copy and paste articles)
5. Content is not overly technical or niche-specific
6. You play nice with others (no hate speech or undue nastiness)

To join submit your URL here

Removal

Blogs will be removed without notice if their feed goes down and clogs up the updating process. This is not to be rude, but just to allow Laplap to be fixed fast. Once the issue is resolved please make contact again to be resyndicated.

Also, blogs which are not updated in 2 months or more may be desyndicated to lessen the strain on Laplap.

Technical Details

Laplap is built on the Wordpress blogging system and hosted on Dreamhost servers. It functions as a metablog by ‘reading’ the feeds or all its member blogs. It then publishes those as new posts using the FeedWordpress plugin and a Cron job.

For the post stats at top Laplap uses SparkStats, for the latest photos it uses FlickrRSS and for the list of popular posts it uses Ozh’s Click Counter. The look and feel is a slightly modified version of the Drunkey Love theme.

Recommendations

For Blogs

• Wordpress.com – this is a free hosted service (meaning you don’t have to worry about anything). It also produces valid feeds, is easy to use, lets you upload images, etc.
• Blogger.com – the original blogging tool, now owned by Google. Also a free hosted service. Their writing facilities are a bit less advanced, but stable. Maybe just different
• Wordpress (professional) – this is a blogging program you host on your own server, with your own domain name. A bit more demanding, but rewarding. Laplap runs on Wordpress.

For Photos

• Flickr: Semi-free photo sharing service which provides exquisite photos. Any photos you upload there and tag ’vanuatu’ will show up on Vanuatu automatically. Their free service is limited to 20MB per month. The pay service offers 2GB of photos per month.
• Picasa: This is a Google desktop photo management program which lets you post directly to Blogger or Picasa web albums.

General Etiquette

Please shorten your hyperlinks, they break Laplap. When you link to something select the word and link that, don’t put a naked link in the post (like this: http://www.laplap.org).

Also try not to use fancy formatting in your posts unless you really need to. Laplap strips most extra tags, but writing clean and simple posts is generally a good thing.