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A Blog Roundup Experiment

January 15th, 2009 by dave

Thanks to Grand Strand Blogger Bonnie Shull (one of the posters at the family blog Killer Robot Clan), I’m going to try out an experiment. People love the blog roundups, but they are labor intensive enough that even in our fairly small community they have burned out the contributors (which to date has only ever been Bonnie and me. Step up, GSB!)

Bonnie pointed out this plugin, which allows for automatic digest posts of an RSS feed. I’m going to set one up that aggregates our whole blogroll. Once a day, a post will be generated here for all the GSB posts in the previous 24 hours. It will lack the personal touch, but it will in fact happen at all, which is better than the human intervention has been. Leave some feedback in the comments whether you’d prefer infrequent human roundups or clockwork machine roundups. Voting for the former carries a whole lot more weight if you are also volunteering to do some. That’s kind of how it works in community labor situations. Thanks, GS Bloggers!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Local Roundup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

3 Responses to “A Blog Roundup Experiment”

  1. Bonnie Shull Says:
    January 17th, 2009 at 11:02 am

    I like the new digests (obviously, lol) especially the second digest where the blog names were added to the links. This means that I can just follow this blog instead of a large and dynamic OPML. It also means we’ll all get link love on a much more regular basis.

    It might be good to set the digest posts as their own category, and offer up a category specific feed. It also might be a good idea to create two content tabs, one for hyper-local community blogging and the other for digests. The hyper-local posts could be the default view when you come to the site. That way the digest feeds won’t drown out the more human content.

  2. dave Says:
    January 18th, 2009 at 3:45 pm

    The difference between the first and second roundup is about 2 hours working with Yahoo Pipes. There is a pipe that takes each feed, prepends the blog name to each item in the title, sorts by date and takes the last 50 items. We’ll see how maintainable this is, because every new blog needs to go in the pipe.

    For the moment, I’m going to leave things as they are. Really, I’d like to have the blog roundups prevented from overwhelming the site by having other posts made. If this works (and it looks like it will), that lifts a burden so people can make other local posts, commentary on the local scene and news, other hyperlocal coverage, etc without the grind of blog roundups. I’d love to see more coverage in every community in the area from Aynor and Loris to Surfside and Little River. I can dream my little dream.

  3. Josh Says:
    January 22nd, 2009 at 2:54 am

    Dave,

    I’m trying to use Digest Post to do something very similar to what you’ve done, but having trouble getting it to work. I’ve installed it on my WordPress blog, edited the plugin with the URL of my feed (I’m trying to get a digest of my Tumblr feed), and set the time I’d like it to run, but nothing happens.

    Unfortunately, I can’t find any support information for this plugin. No forums, not even a Plugin Homepage.

    You seem to have made it work quite nicely for you. Would you mind helping me out? Did you have any issues making it work? Would you be willing to share your code, so that I could replicate what you’ve done?

    Any help you could provide would be much appreciated.

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