February 23, 2003

Playing with the MT-RSSfeed plugin

Christian Crumlish

So far I've tried several different methods for aggregating posts from multiple blogs onto one page. One method is the multiauthor tool I use in Radio to pick up the RSS feeds from my other blogs and post them to the x-syndicate category here at RFB. Then if I want those posts to show up on the home page (as I often do, since I figure this is the one blog of mine that most people read), I have to edit the post manually (at which point I restore the title, which Radio's aggregator folds into the entry text).

Another approach is to set up a TrackBack ping metablog (see Blogroots or The American Times for examples of what I mean), but there's something I still don't understand about this and I haven't managed to get it to work yet.

These are really different methods, as the first one turns the picked up entry into a new post on the recipient blog, whereas the pinging method just adds a link and a description to a list, but the items in the list aren't blog entries, don't have permalinks, don't get archived, etc.

Other tools I've played with but not gotten working yet include RSS Monkey, which as I understand it would enable me to list recent posts from a number of blogs (or any RSS source, in fact) but wouldn't necessarily fold them together into a single string.

To get that same effect, I just installed the MTlist and MTRSSfeed plugins available at the new MT-plugins website, and set up a list of RSS feeds at my experimental metaxian blog. This does a good job of listing the headings and would enable me to include that kind of list in, say, a sidebar on any of my MT blogs.

A better approach might be something like what Phil Gyford has done at haddock.org where blog posts from multiple participants are listed sequentially (but can also be sorted by blog). For all I know RSS Monkey can do this too, but this is really where I'd like to go with my metabloggery experiments.

Fortunately, Phil is on the Well and has volunteered to help me set up a similar group blog front-end for Well bloggers. Once I understand that I'll try it for a few other groups I can think of, such as Salon bloggers.

Posted by xian at February 23, 2003 12:50 PM
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