Via the magic of RSS blog feeds and the Planet aggregator I got hold of today, I’ve put together an afterlife blog aggregation (or ‘planet’) of all the blogs belonging to afterlife authors, as well as a couple of others. Hope you all don’t mind!
There’s still a few issues with the system – currently it only updates a HTML file on my computer when blogs get updated, and doesn’t yet upload this file to the web until I do this myself. In other words, it should update itself when people add new blog entries but it doesn’t at the moment.
There’s also an issue with Movable Type not providing me with the full blog entry in the RSS file, which requires editing the template for index.rdf to fix for each blog. Change the MTEntryExcerpt tag to MTEntryBody in the ‘RSS 1.0 template’ file if you want to change this for your blog.
I’m interested to know what people think of this system? Is it worthwhile? Can it be made any better? Comments in the box, please 🙂
Oh christ… lord knows why you’ve put me in there! Especially after the picture I posted a few days ago 🙂
Looks good – I’d use it myself if I hadn’t got Firefox already doing more or less the same thing for me – I reckon it should be useful for people who don’t have any knowledge of/motivation to use RSS though.
A couple of things: Yes, I agree with you that MT’s habit of putting about a sentence and a half into its RSS summaries is a pain in the arse.
More importantly – can you make it a bit shorter? There’s necessarily a lot to read there, and the page takes aeons to load on a narrow connection. It’s not the kind of thing you consider while on broadband, but I thought you might like to know the 56k’er point of view 🙂