Via Msr Dog comes FeedWordPress…
“FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from newsfeeds that you select into your WordPress blog; if you syndicate several newsfeeds then you can WordPress’s posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation (”planet”) website.”
I wonder how this compares to Robert’s WordPress aggregator… there must be something aggregatory in the air at the moment!
Well, I tried to get it running and encountered an error. Seemed to install just fine, but then the snag. So, I’ve written to the developer and I’ll let you know if I can get it running.
On the face of it, I’d say this one is powerful. More powerful than the wp-rss-aggreagate.php hack/mod. FeedWordPress is a true plugin and requires few steps to install. It can be added to an existing blog without pulling in all the ‘parent’ blog’s categories, too. Make one new category and boom – you’ve got new content.
There are some ethical considerations with both of these when used in that manner, in my opinion. But, with attribution and links to the originating blog, most of those questions are covered. Still, it would likely be best to write for permission to re-publish the works of others. I did that on the Writers blog.
The best part, to me, is the ability to narrowly define choice feeds and create a private (password protected) site for group study. Then the ethical issues are avoided. But, I am sure there are many more uses.
James, thanks for sharing this one. I think this may be the ‘keeper’ of all ‘keepers’, so far.
Thanks for that Robert, I’m going to go crashing into these when I get back to work so should be able to get something going… I do know through feed2js, Drupal and these though that there’s a good shift happening in public aggregation at the moment.
Hmm, wonder if you could plug this in to Multi-User WordPress to achieve something similar to what Planet does, i.e. multiple aggregate blogs?
Charles, from RadGeek, wrote back and the fix was something simple. His plugin relies on the cURL PHP extension, currently. And, it was not enabled on my installation. So, it is enabled now and the “FeedWordPress” plugin works like a charm! Charles seems like a really nice guy. He writes that perhaps a new “release should be out soon” that makes the plugin more universally usable. Kudos to the RadGeek!
Todd, I guess that could be done, because the plugin would go into each new blog and each new blog can then be configured to aggregate any one feed or a multiple number of feeds.
My first observation is that it treats the dates correctly, unlike the wp-rss-aggregate.php one does. And “FeedWordPress” does pull in the posts as they exist (links functional and all) from the parent blog and also places them in (or creates them, if they don’t exist) the correct category folder that exists in the parent blog, too.
I think now I’m going to create a fresh WP 1.5 install and test it on that. “FeedWordPress” is much more powerful and it ‘is’ the WordPress ‘keeper’ app.
Thanks for that! I’ve posted on the WPMU forums (as I’m not sure how well it will fit in with the templating engine) so we’ll see what comes up:
http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/
Still trying to work out what FeedWordPress does…is it similar to syndicating feeds into a blog via RSStoHTML using a tool like RSS Digest?
Or is it an RSS reader…what’s going on?
John, this post might help:
http://tinyurl.com/b6xpa
It’s pretty cool… need to automate feed collection though somehow.
John, here is a site that uses it, too.
blog.prtopics.com
I put that one up for my students.
You’ll note that the links on each title of the posts sends the reader to the post in the blog of origin. Although, you can have the links stay as permalinks to the blog you create.
Crontabs will automatically grab the feeds however often you define the frequency. That blog, for instance, updates each hour.
Works great for projects where you want to pull several people’s writings into one easy to read/scan location. Maybe a group blog synopsis? There are many other ways to use it, of course.
James, Robert,
I see what you mean by aggregating blogs, but can’t you do this already by remixing all your feeds into one feed, and then syndicating that feed to a blog via RSS Digest (RSStoHTML)…it is like making an automated blog that is self populated…..is this the same thing?
I see the public version of a Bloglines account or a Blogdigger Group as a more of a public aggregator.
With a Blogdigger group it is default as a river of news, or you can choose to adjust the view by filtering; just turn on one feed (and see the posts from just that feed)…not sure if you can get it to show posts from just two feeds, I think you can only choose one or all of them.
…and the good thing is you can subscribe to the RSS feed so you don’t have to go to your Blogdigger group, (so this makes it and RSS mixer as well).
I feel that besides viewing a river of news, you should also have the choice of selecting a feed from the left hand pane, like in Bloglines public version, and just view those entries.
That is, on your example Robert, when you click on one of the 4 blogs on the right side bar it goes to the native site, I want to read the content within the public aggregator.
The downside of Blogdigger Groups or Bloglines Public Version is that you can’t customise the presentation.
Here is my post on thoughts on making a public aggregator:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/06/14/public-rss-aggregator-make-your-own/
Here’s my list of RSS blending tools:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/20/rss-filter-and-re-mix/#eight
Here’s my list of re-syndicating tools:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/20/re-syndication-sidebar-updates-and-more/
Here is an older post for some background on my thoughts:
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2005/05/09/more-than-one-way-to-curate-a-blog/
Cheers…love reading your stuff!
John
(once a Melbournian, recently moved to Perth)