Hey, you got your aggregator in my blogging program!
In A change in habits Matt Mower talks about using Bloglines as a replacement for Radio’s aggregator:
One thing in particular is AWOL — I can’t post straight to Radio from Bloglines. The ability, within the Radio aggregator, to click one button and end up with an item neatly formatted within a new blog post turns out to have been a crucial one for me. My next aggregator will do this, and more besides.
I see that as less a problem for the aggregator to solve, and more a problem of the blogging program not having a good enough aggregator (or not having any aggregator at all, for most). A general purpose aggregator can try to pass items off to blogging software through a link to the PressIt/QuickPost/BlogThis/WhatEver URI, which will be rather fragile and hard to set up and generally gives a rather clunky and feature-poor version of the blogging program’s real posting interface, or it can try to implement an API client, which will be a little easier to set up (sometimes) and only somewhat fragile, but will give a very clunky and feature-poor version of the blogging program’s own interface.
To get the full power of your usual posting interface, you really need your aggregator to hand off an entire synthetic RSS feed consisting of just the full content of that one item, so your blogging program can parse it and make full use of anything it understands or needs. And at that point, you really should be asking why your blogging program doesn’t already have that full item plus the metadata from the feed channel, in its own aggregator.
Rather surprising that there aren’t more blogging programs working on tightly integrating an aggregator, when Radio showed what a good idea it was so many years ago. Well, at least one is.
Phil: I rolled out JournURL’s integrated aggregator a couple weeks ago. Each community can subscribe to feeds, which flow seamlessly into the communal space. Here’s the feeds page for the Living community… mostly foodie and gardening subscriptions at the moment.
(Living is currently configured to allow registered users up to five subscriptions each. But such limits are determined by each community’s caretaker… they’re not hard-wired.)
Anyway… if I see an interesting post in the aggregator, I can click ”Reply” just like I could with a blog entry or forum post, put a check in the ”weblog” box, and there’s a new entry in my blog. Poof.
The capability’s actually been there for over a year… I was just holding off releasing it to individual users until I finished a sizable overhaul of the interface, which took me ’til December. I’m the embodiment of slow and steady, for better or worse.
Another one does it like Radio: PyDS. Of course it is something like a remake of some ideas of Radio in Python, so it’s not that astonishing that it does ;-)