Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with aggregator

No Mo Dogg(dot)

silsurf — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 09:24:50 -0800

What in the heck happened to doggdot.us? I used doggdot.us along with MeFi as a daily investigation of what is going on in the internet world of ours.

About a month ago it disappeared from the internet, my browser would time out in trying to connect to it, starting yesterday I am getting a 403 "Forbidden" redirect.

What's up with that?

Plenty of beaches, but where are the best waves?

Funmonkey1 — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 14:35:20 -0800

InternetFilter: Besides MetaFilter, whats the must read of the day? Tired of perusing the usual suspects for cool things on the internet. As I grow older find myself a bit less enthused over reddit, fark, digg, etc. As we all know, Metafilter is the holy grail of knowledge and all things fantastic, but I find myself wondering if there are a couple of pit stops missing before arriving here that will make my internet time better. Thinking along the lines of science, art, sociology, psychology, music and more. Any and all suggestions much appreciated.

43places alternative?

Leech — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:19:28 -0800

Anyone knows a good alternative to 43places.com? 43places is great, I like to social idea, the lot of pictures and info you get, but 43 places is too limited. 43places.com is great, but they only allow to bookmark 43 places! I want to go to more places!

Now for a FarAway() function, and we can code up a fairytale!

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 09:37:33 -0800

How do I convert RSS feed timestamps to relative timestamps or "time ago", for example: "12 minutes ago?" I've got a bunch of aggregated RSS feeds, and I would like to display relative timestamps - "timeago", "timesince" or "fuzzy time", it seems there are many names for it - in the HTML output, like Recent Activity does for registered Mefi users.

Here's an example (self-link). Those of you who have seen Electicker will note that the site already does this (self-link), but those feeds are run through Feeddigest and I'd like to move the legwork to my own server (if only for the more frequent updates).

Do any of you know about an elegant way to do this, preferably in PHP or even Yahoo! Pipes? Note that I will want to do this for a whole bunch of feeds from various sources and native timezones, so I'm guessing there will need to be some timezone conversion (to UTC or something) involved.

Thanks in advance!

How can I get an RSS feed to play nice with all the other feeds in the aggregator?

perpetualstroll — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 13:37:25 -0800

Is there a free service online that will allow me to aggregate RSS feeds, but will only show the last entry from each blog? (more details below) I am currently using a feed aggregator (feeddigest.com) to combine 15 feeds into a single one for integration into a website. However, one of the blogs has a tendency to update once an hour and is drowning out the rest of the blogs that only update once a day.

Is there a free service out there like feeddigest.com that has a function which will allow me to "throttle" the hyper-active blog and will only show the latest entry so that all the others have a chance to be seen?

Creating a Popurls-like site

elmwood — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:48:54 -0800

How can I create a singlegator site like Popurls? Popurls is one of the few sites on my Firefox bookmarks toolbar. It's a "singlegator" that displays the headlines of RSS feeds from many popular sites, including Metafilter, on one page.

I'd like to create a site with a similar format as Popurls, but with feeds for those sharing my profession. Are there programs or scripts readily available to create a Popurls-like singlegator page for my Web site? (FWIW, the site has a Drupal CMS front end that is integrated with a vBulletin message board.)

Sorry, Slashdot types, but "learn PHP and roll your own" isn't an option. I can make very minor modifications to existing scripts, but forget about creating something from scratch.

How can I aggregate (scrape) email from many different POP/IMAP/web-based accounts to a single server?

merkuron — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 16:32:57 -0800

How can I aggregate (scrape) email from many different POP/IMAP/web-based accounts to a single server? I'm attempting to simplify how I use email. Right now, I have many different accounts, each with a very specific purpose. I have most of them feed into Outlook, and they're treated as separate accounts, each of them fetched individually by Outlook at regular intervals. Because I don't always have my computer with Outlook handy, I check my email via web interfaces - one for each account. I recently set up a new server box at home, and want to turn it into an email aggregator, sort of a home-rolled Gmail. I'd like it to pull email from all the different accounts I have, store it locally, and serve it up via IMAP or (by extension) a web interface that I'd install on it.

The question is, what kind of software am I looking for, and does it exist? I've tried searching Google with "email aggregator", "imap aggregator", "pop aggregator", and any combination of those with other keywords such as "server" and "open source", but nothing pops up. Can the wise MeFites help me out on this one?

* FYI: I do not want to use Gmail to do this, for three reasons:
1. Google's poor privacy policies.
2. Remote-storage only, hard to back up.
3. No IMAP access to Gmail.

How to Find Great Blogs on Any Subject?

XSteveMurphy — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 08:56:05 -0800

How can I find a great blog on a subject I have found a new interest in? For instance, and this is only an example, if I found a new love for blu-ray and wanted to find a blog with reviews and new features and players. I could search google for "blu-ray blog" or "blu-ray reviews" but there are tons of sites and there's no way to screen them. I also want to try to find blogs my mom might be interested in, and I'm hoping to find some list of blogs with ratings or reviews by subject. Any thoughts?

I need an alternative to NetVibes

HotPatatta — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 18:07:08 -0800

Anyone know of a good alternative to www.NetVibes.com? I need to be able to create tabs and put a list of bookmarks and maybe RSS feeds underneath each tab. I just started library school and our professor wanted us to use NetVibes.com to create a virtual reference desk. Everyone in the class has discovered bugs with NetVibes and we are trying to find an alternative. For example, you can't put a different list of bookmarks under each tab. Also, we don't want to use tags for organizing bookmarks. So here's what I'm looking for. I need something that works like NetVibes, with tabs that can be labeled with titles like "Government" "News" "Entertainment" "Encyclopedias" "Search Engines" etc. Under each tab, we need to be able to add a list of links and maybe RSS feeds (if possible). Google's new "personalized homepage" now has tabs that can be added, but the problem is that you can only add about 6 tabs. We need to be able to have between 15-30.
It can't require knowing HTML because most of the students don't know how to do that.
Thanks for any suggestions you might have!!

Looking for good social link aggregators, like MeFi or Digg, or alternatively suggest ideas for a new one.

MetaMonkey — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:30:40 -0800

I’m looking for good social link aggregators, like MeFi or Digg, or alternatively suggest ideas for a new one. On slow days I can’t get enough interesting/cool links. There are the 6 big ones: Metafilter, Reddit, Slashdot, Digg, Delicious, and Linkfilter. But where else do you go to get a regularly updated stream of quality, eclectic links? I’m after sites with interesting links about science, tech, society, culture, arts, games, so on (not necessarily all at once). Not really looking for Fark-a-likes or news sites.

Alternative bonus question: if I (or whoever) were to make a new social link aggregator site, what features would you like to see, or what direction should it go in? Does the web need a new reddit, since it appears to be inching toward shark-jumping territory?

Keeping up with comment threads across sites?

Mr. Gunn — Thu, 04 May 2006 19:23:17 -0800

How do I keep up with interesting comment threads across sites? I already use an RSS aggregator to keep up with site-posted content, but sometimes I want to know what has been posted to a comment thread since I last read the comments. The problem is that I don't always remember which site it was on, or how to get back to it. I know most activity drops off once things scroll off the front page, so I really am looking for a way to scrape the comments for a given URL or forum thread and keep them all in one place so I know what's happening where. This problem would be solved if you could subscribe to a feed for any thread on any site, but since that's not possible, what's the next best thing?

Online RSS reader?

bonaldi — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 16:52:45 -0800

Is there a server-based RSS aggregator that works like Safari RSS? I use and like Safari's RSS reader, but I'm fed up only being able to check it at home, on Safari. Is there a web-based option that works in roughly a similar way?

If you don't know it, Safari RSS lets you:
* view all new items from your feeds on one long page
* shows them as text+images, not how the actual web page looks
* marks them read once they've been displayed (ie you don't have to manually mark them all)
* has a search, and option to display how much of the article entries you see.

I'd prefer something that ran on my own server (Dreamhost, so most things available including perl, php etc), but a website would do at a pinch.

Online RSS Aggregator Recommendations?

HK10036 — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 11:37:39 -0800

Online RSS Aggregator Recommendations? Netvibes, Pageflakes, etc... My blog addiction has forced me to figure out how to use feeds. I've been using Netvibes for the last week (it's scary to see how many blogs you read all spread out on one page) but I'm aware that there are many other similar pages. Pageflakes looks interesting but doesn't seem to work with the Opera browser.

The more I look at these aggregator sites with there various features the more they come to resemble Portals. Should I just set up a nice Google homepage instead?

Basically I'm trying to find out what you Mefites consider to be the best online aggregators that work with Opera.

ISO: RSS Aggregating CMS

sohcahtoa — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 10:21:39 -0800

What free CMS has the best RSS aggregator features? Yet another CMS question.

I'm setting up a site that I'd like to duplicate a subset of the features of a site like Bloglines. I'd like it to take in RSS feeds, convert the items in the feeds to local "nodes", and allow users to manage those items. Most importantly, the uesrs should be able to comment on the items from the feed. Also, I'd like to be able for users to "promote" the item to a blog or forum entry, have filtered views, and be able to trigger actions (like, email a feed item with commentary) from the feed.

Other features the CMS needs in general should include good access control and forums, but I'm most interested for this question in finding the best open source RSS aggregator.

I'm most familiar with Drupal and have some of the functionality I need in the Aggregator2 module. That module is still in development, though, and doesn't do everythign I need, especially regarding filtered views (which isn't within that module's scope, I understand). I'm not expecting to find everything I need and expect to do some customization.

Are there other CMSes I should be investigating?

It's important that the feeds become local objects in the CMS, so it needs to be an aggregator, not just a reader.

I've looked at the Blog Software Breakdown, CMS Matrix, Open Source CMS, and previous questions.