VIDEOGoogle Reader closes at the end of the month, and it’s going to make a few things around the web break. Here, we use it to power the Other Botany Blogs widget on the right. There are plenty of options for people to move their personal feeds (see below), but is there value in a public aggregation of RSS feeds?
I’ve looked at how to put together a site that pulls in headlines from various (~100) botany/plant blogs and then makes a combined feed that anyone can re-use. So far I’ve not found a good free way to do this, but the problem can be solved if I hand over some money. The answer would be to set up a new server and install something like Pligg .
The advantage Pligg has over many Digg/Reddit clones is that it can automatically pull in RSS feeds from blogs. It should be possible to set it up to check a site twice a day and then mix the feeds together in roughly date order. It gets complicated when some people’s feeds don’t have dates. I have a couple of questions.
Would you use this?
I expect the answer is no. Personal solutions tend to be better. Alan Cann is using The Old Reader , I’m also using NewsBlur and a lot of people are using Feedly . The appeal of a site following 100 feeds picked by someone else is limited, but it might be useful for some people. If I’m wrong and a lot of people are interested I can make more time to work on it.
Would you object to this?
There are different ways of doing this. The way I want to do it is automatically pull in a headline and a brief snippet of a blog post. I have looked at Planet, but that tends to pull in full feeds. That means it make visiting the source site unnecessary. If people are reading your blog, I think it would at least be nice to add to the page views of the site. The best way of adding sites would be if people actively consented, but a few of the feeds in the file are from dormant sites. Their authors might not be taking much of an interest in what they’re doing right now , but they could spring back to life. It’s useful to track these sites, but you’re not likely to get active consent for that. If you’re wary of having your feed compiled with sites then let me know in the comments. I’d rather know before I set this up than remove lots of feeds from the site after I’ve set it up.
It’s not certain the feed aggregator will happen, or will happen soon. The new version of WordPress will mean a few changes on this site. I’ve been tracking that too and we have a new theme, layout and a few other changes ready for when WP3.6 is released. It might be that its launch will clash with the closing of Reader, and the blog is the priority.
If there’s no interest then I’m happy to let the aggregator idea go. It has its positive side, but it’s also one more thing to go wrong and one more place to get spam too.