Stop me if you've heard this one before…
Okay, so I was washing the dishes the other day, thinking about Communities on LiveJournal (as you do) and them being one of the frequently cited reasons why people don't want to move to WordPress. The idea of RSS feed aggregators popped into my head – stuff like RSSmeme – and I was like, Hey wait a sec…
See, here's what I'm thinking:
- You'd set up a script that would accept RSS or Atom feeds for blogs.
- Membership could be 'open' (anyone can ping) or closed (pings will only be accepted from listed sites).
- The script would have zero or more topics.
- Topics would match up against the
<category>tag in feeds. - Matching topics (or all posts pinged to the script, depending on how it's set up) would then appear mirrored at the script's site. They'd get dumped into a database, and the script would then aggregate these into a new feed, but all permalinks and comment links would be preserved from the original posts.
- Updates could either be pinged to the script (in the same way you ping blog update services now), or – in the case of 'closed membership' sites – fetched manually by a cronjob. The fetch would pull out the given feed and extract all topical posts.
- Profit.
If that makes sense? So, like, say I set up a aggregator for "World of Warcraft". All site feeds with either <category>World of Warcraft</category> or <category term="World of Warcraft"/>1 would then get dumped into a summary on the script site. Yeah?
Thing is, I can't believe something like this doesn't already exist. Just… where? And if it doesn't exist… I guess vs.com has just been born.
Oh, and in other news. Urban Nordica now has a Facebook page. Y'all go join, okay?
- You'd make the match alphanumeric, case insensitive (e.g.
worldofwarcraft). ^
Mirrored from v-s.net. Comments are preferred on the original.
