RSS server based aggregation
Things have been a little quiet round here lately, mainly because I write most of my posts on the uninteruppted 35 minute bus ride to and from work. However in the last week the rides have been spent investigating RSS aggregators and testing them on my trusty powerbook.
What I am looking for is to take feeds from a variety of sources and put them into a single feed or feeds. Two reasons, one is take the feeds from my fellow Port80 members; multiple personality Kay, Adrian, Miles and Myles. So I can use it instead of a blogroll and also make it available to the others in the group and beyond to encourage each other to keep up with regular quaility postings. If you have any ideas on what to call a bunch of Port80 bloggers, Kay would like to know.
Also for work, I would like to be able to take a couple of different feeds and be able to show that you can then redistribute the content based on categories in those feeds to other feeds.
I have looked at FeedonFeeds and CafeRSS, but neither did what I wanted.
I have had a play with feedwordpress plugin. It intergrates too well into WordPress, which is great for some projects, for example if multiple personality Kay of the soon to be four blogs wanted to make all her postings available in one blog, all she needs to do is create another WordPress blog, install feedwordpress, configure it and the incoming RSS feeds and every time she post to one of here many blogs it would appear in this one blog too. Unfortunately for my needs I did not really need it tied so close to WordPress.
Gregarius is an amazingly configurable web based RSS aggerator/reader built with mySQL and PHP and with more than a passing resemblance to WordPress in options and structure. But it is also way to specific for my needs. The backend is what I need, but the frontend is all about one person reading their feeds via a web browser. Still if I can not find exactly what I need, I can sit down and take Gregarius apart and build a very simple front end for my needs. Only problem I need to learn a lot more about PHP to do that.
Today, I found BDP RSS Aggregator another WordPress plugin which appears to do what I want, so something to experiment with tomorrow.
I am open to any suggestions to stop me from picking up that PHP manual.
tagged gregarius
October 23rd, 2005 at 4:25 pm
Hmmm… so really, you want to aggregate feeds and republish them? If you could generate the combined feed, I’m sure there’s wordpress plugins to output them. Or you could just point people to the feed and they could do whatever they want with them. We could run it off the Port80 site.
What about Magpie? Maybe you could find a Madpilot to help with the PHP!
October 23rd, 2005 at 6:30 pm
Kay what I really want to do is aggregate our feeds, which is done in Gregarious using Magpie (as are most server based RSS readers/aggregators) and then allow people to make use of them in whatever way the see fit. Port80 might use a feed of all the post summaries of all members, where I would use the name and title of everybody’s posts except mine.
My theory is that the odds are somebody else has already built it or something similar, so find and make use of it instead of building it myself from scratch.
October 23rd, 2005 at 8:28 pm
Well, Gregarius has an RSS-rendering theme which allows you to export an RSS feed of pretty much anything you can see in the web interface (e.g. a feed of your tags, of a category, the results of a search, and so on.)
The RSS theme is bundled into Gregarius 0.5.2 and greater, and you may want to install the RSS view plugin to expose the different feeds.