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Content Filtering and Websites

On Erieblogs.com, we poll local blogs and publish a list of recent entries from all the sites. It's a great tool, and something that I think people reload several times a day, just as I do. As a blog writer, I also notice I get a large amount of referrals from that "Recently Updated" list.

Our goal is to spread the word about things happening in Erie and to promote all the great local blogs to as wide an audience as possible.

In order to keep the site from getting blacklisted from content filtering websites like Websense, a couple of months ago I wrote a function that stars out curse words in blog post titles included in our recently updated list. I have no problem with any of the words, in fact I use most of them daily, but I did it because our readership includes every major business in the area, hospitals, schools, media outlets and more. I want the site to reach as wide an audience as possible, and I fear if we get blocked, our audience goes way down. It's not a Erieblogs-centric goal - if we get blocked then traffic goes down at all the sites we link to.

We don't censor what anyone writes on their own blogs - either the body or the title. We're not the content police, we're merely the aggregators.

Here's the thing: our filter isn't perfect. It will catch the big words, ones that start with F and SH. It fails sometimes, as it did this weekend, on a word like cucumber. It's an honest mistake, and something that I've corrected. It's a fluid system and something that isn't set in stone.

I left a funny comment on this site, but I wanted to explain it better here, as I think my humor attempt may be lost.

If any site we poll would like their feed not inclued in our list, just let me know and I'll remove it.