cityfilter

June 10, 2005 9:10 AM

I want to do a city related blog aggregation. How do I do this?

My city is smallish. I have a list of bloggers in my city. We want to be able to have a website that aggregates the posts on these blogs to a central place easily (most of them are not tech savvy). I have a server with php and mysql. Where do I start? I would also like to integrate upcoming.org events in the future, so something that could be built on would be helpful.

posted by striker to Technology (9 answers total)

Check out Arborblogs, an aggregation site of Ann Arbor weblogs. The guys who run it are geeks, and talk about the process on the front page.
Also, the guy who runs it is revgeorge on MeFi.
posted by klangklangston at 9:21 AM on June 10, 2005

Also Universal Hub for Boston. (He's using Drupal to run the site and the aggregation)
posted by briank at 9:35 AM on June 10, 2005

Planet Cincinnati uses the Planet Planet aggregator.
posted by mmascolino at 9:55 AM on June 10, 2005

Ooops...its actually just called the Planet Agregator. That's what you get when you refer to a product by its website and not its name.
posted by mmascolino at 9:57 AM on June 10, 2005

DC has a really cool one, although the high-tech version doesn't seem to be working for me right now in firefox.
posted by callmejay at 10:11 AM on June 10, 2005

I've been trying to do this with CaRP, which I know costs money and free scripts do the same thing better, but it's what I cut my teeth on. I'm not a fan of Drupal, but the Planet Aggregator looks interesting. I'm guessing it, like CaRP, does caching, so that each hit on the page doesn't hit each subscribed feed?
posted by pzarquon at 10:15 AM on June 10, 2005

Also see the php-based zfeeder. I use it to display my Netflix RSS queue and shipping feeds on a page so that my friends can see what's coming. It took me about 30 minutes to put up.
posted by exhilaration at 2:23 PM on June 10, 2005

Response by poster: Thanks for your replies, I'm zfeeder looks nice (does it cache?). I also am looking at lilinia. I would like to be able to pull/highlight certain posts on the main page. Would appreciate any other advice about starting one of these (revgeorge?) from anyone who comes across this AskMe as it scrolls off the main page.
posted by striker at 2:29 PM on June 10, 2005

I used Planet to set up a Charlottesville, VA blog aggregator last night. It took about 10 minutes, plus a little time to write a passable style sheet.
posted by waldo at 1:02 PM on June 12, 2005