How to show updates of sub blogs on a community blog?

September 9, 2005 11:26 AM

blogFilter: So a professor wants to use a blog type setup for a class. I've been charged with trying to find a way to show updates across blogs in this class.

So there is a class blog powered by Movable Type (a community blog) and each student has a WordPress blog of their own. Is there a way to show when students update their individual blogs on the community blog? I've been reading about pinging via XML-RPC but I'm not seeing any nice plugins for the server end of things. (I'm not a fantastic programmer)

I have access to the MT server and I can add things to the WP install package that will be given to students if that helps.

posted by asterisk to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Disclaimer: I'm the primary stakeholder of this company..

FeedDigest will let you put in all the various RSS feeds of each blog into a single 'digest' you can include with JavaScript across the blogs. It'll mix all the various blogs' post links together, and, well, bob's your uncle. Signup is currently down as we're making a major upgrade, but I'll create you an account if you e-mail me (address on site).

I'm not sure of module based solutions, but I'm sure there probably is one!
posted by wackybrit at 11:50 AM on September 9, 2005

I hate to give you an answer you didn't ask for, but if you're open to other options, Drupal does this automatically. I have used it for several class blogs, and it works especially well for academic sites. Each student gets his or her own blog, and these individual blogs are all tied to a central class blog, which is controlled by the instructor. The software has an out-of-the-box feature that will create a sidebar list (or full page) that aggregates the posts from all of the students in the class.

If you're interested and have other questions, my email is in my profile.
posted by lewistate at 12:40 PM on September 9, 2005

Tim Appnel's Feeds.App plugin for MT will let you publish your students' RSS/Atom feeds on your MT blog.
posted by evariste at 1:10 PM on September 9, 2005

That's the plugin I was trying to think of, yeah, Feeds.App could do it. That said, you would still want to mix the feeds somehow, or just have them all as separate blocks.
posted by wackybrit at 2:58 PM on September 9, 2005

Take a look at the Planet Planet software. It combines several blogs on a single web page. You also get a combined RSS feed. Example installations: Planet Gnome, Planet Debian.
posted by reynaert at 3:03 AM on September 10, 2005