Aggregating blogs
Alan recently posted on the need to aggregate several blogs in one place. He mentioned some of the options like Bloglines, Blogdigger (a site I quit using when it lost my subscriptions), and RSSMix. Tom beat me to the punch in mentioning PlanetPlanet, which I had previously looked at and finally found a need for.
One instructor, Mary Arnold, has asked her IDS 203 students to blog on ethics. One of the requirements is that students read their classmates’ blogs. My experience of seeing the glazed eyes when I have talked about RSS, Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, and RSS aggregators to several classes told me we have to make this easier.
Enter PlanetPlanet. I get a list of students in the class and add them to a “Planet,” a term I’m using to refer to a site/page that aggregates blogs on a topic/theme or blogs of all students in a class. The potential here is great, assuming we can use our Blojsom blogs’ ability to generate category feeds (and that students actually use categories).
When I have the time, I need to figure out how to change the time format in PlanetPlanet from UTC to local time. I’ll also need to write a script that will generate these planets automatically from a class roster.
For students that prefer using RSS, PlanetPlanet will generate an OPML file for you.
I’ll make a prettier home for the planets, but right now it’s here (and CSS-less), and planets will be subdirectories, such as IDS 203.
May 31st, 2005 - 10:23 am
Wow, that works great. So I really mus knuckled down and learn Python? Is deep python knowledge needed or can one fake it?
The one feature I would like to see and do not (or perhaps missed it) was a new RSS feed that represents the aggregation of all subscribed blogs.
May 31st, 2005 - 10:36 am
Alan, the RSS feed is generated but I don’t have a link to it in the template. It’s here: http://blogs.zanestate.edu/planets/ids203/rss20.xml.
The IDS course is using the “fancy” template–the only mod I did was to add the OPML link.
Adding/configuring blogs is as easy as editing a text file (a different config.ini for each planet you want). The file is commented, and to add a feed just requires:
[http://feed_url]
name = blog or blogger name
I have next to no knowledge of Python and was able to get it running. The trickier part for me was adding it to cron to update every 30 minutes.
May 31st, 2005 - 11:34 am
[…] tes. I found this as I followed a trackback on a recent entry to something at Todd’s Big IDEA blog at Zane State College. And this connection would not really had been […]
June 17th, 2005 - 5:18 pm
Maybe you will be interested by the patch I made for a French planet. In France we are living at GMT+2 in summer.
For more information, have a look at : http://machard.org/blog/?p=25