Multiple Site Integration

May 18, 2005 | 10 Comments

So, as many of you know, I’ve been launching new content channels left and right. I’ve got various reasons why I’m doing this and not just keeping everything here at Asterisk, most of which I’m not going to get into right this second.

What I did want to talk a bit about is how I’m trying to keep them all “together” in some ways. It’s not an ideal solution, but I do want some “cross-pollination” going on between my sites. One of my goals is to broaden my writing horizons and speak to new audiences.

(Not that I don’t love my readers here — not at all!)

I’ve got a few ways I’ve been handling this. Mainly Movable Type plugins (MTOtherBlog is what I’ll be using to pull Sweetdex in) and Del.icio.us.

Del.icio.us and Tags

What I’m doing with Del.icio.us seems to work pretty well. It’s my preferred method for blogrolling and keeping track of my favorite links. What I’m able to do is not only pull entries from my Wordpress run sites in by simply adding them to my list, but I’m also able to create link lists for those sites without having to create a new account.

I simply tag links that I want to appear on those sites. If youlook at the link list on iPodarmy.com for example, you’ll notice it’s a subset of what you’ve got here. What it’s doing is simply pulling in the RSS for things I’ve tagged with “iPodarmy”. This is nice in that it allows you to have a “master” list as well as smaller, more targeted lists. A very nice, practical use of tagging, IMHO.

I Want Something Better

Right now what I’ve got seems like a hack, but I can’t seem to find many ways to splice, parse and remix my content in all the ways I keep thinking of. Maybe it’s just a matter of time.

I really like what Kottke did with Ajax and his RSS parser to pull in content via other sites. I think I could use something like that, my only problem is that I’ve not been able to find an RSS parser that’ll do what I want in an easy manner.

Maybe he’ll let me steal his?

As well, that doesn’t address my feeds. What I’d like (and I’m hoping Feedburner will get on this soon) is a way to splice multiple feeds, much as they do with Flickr and Del.icio.us. That way I can accommodate those of you who read via RSS and would prefer not to have multiple feeds devoted to different topics.

I could offer a “master” feed that splices all of my content into one feed.

It would be my ultimate goal to have as many ways to pull my content down as there are ways people want to access it.

Filed under: Web Development
Keyword Tags: del.icio.us rss atom feedburner content feeds integration

Comments

1. Ray said:

Not sure if this is what you are looking for, but I use Feed to javascript and the Magpie RSS Parser too bring in the feed from one of my sites to the sidebar of the other with a single line of javascript.

It took all of maybe 10-15 minutes to set up and I’ve had no problems with it. Just add the feed URL you want to the line of JS and you’re good to go.

I’m not sure that it can handle splicing feeds but if you know more PHP than I do you might be able to use this combination as a starting point.

Apologies for all the links :)

Posted on May 18, 2005 04:42 PM | #

2. Ray said:

Well… I guess you can ignore my previous posts. It appears that my databases are hosed.

Posted on May 18, 2005 05:08 PM | #

3. Philipp Keller said:

Putting your words into my words:
Is it right that you have multiple feeds. Now you want to have one “master feed” containing all posts from all your feeds as well as part of your master feed, say all posts about design or music or whatever.
So you want something like
masterfeed.xml?tags=music giving you all your posts on music
or masterfeed.xml?tags=design+css giving you your posts that are on design and css (that is: intersection) or masterfeed.xml?tags=music|art giving you all your posts on music or art?

I am programming a kind of “tag client” that will be able to import bookmarks from del.icio.us as well as posts from wordpress or MT. Then, you can do queries as mentioned above and display the result as RSS for instance.. I started to program the thing but now I am stuck in doing performance tests and DB schema design research, but if there is the need for such a tool then this gives me some motivation..

Posted on May 18, 2005 10:57 PM | #

4. Moises Kirsch said:

If you can use PHP inside MT I would recommend MagpieRSS… it is a free open source script wich parses RSS files.

It uses cache files and a librarie for opening external files that makes it work on even some of the tightest security installations I’ve seen.

Posted on May 19, 2005 01:00 AM | #

5. geeky said:

I use MagpieRSS (seeing a theme here?) to parse an RSS feed from blo.gs to make my blogroll. It’s easy to use and pretty powerful. Maybe that would work for you as well?

Posted on May 19, 2005 07:24 AM | #

6. Keith said:

I’ve played with MagpieRSS a bit (it’s what runs the Wordpress plugins that do my del.icio.us links on To-done and iPodarmy, but I’ve not had time to see how it could work here. I’ll check into that when I’ve got time, thanks for the tips.

Posted on May 19, 2005 08:50 PM | #

7. David Raynes said:

As the author of MTOtherBlog, I just wanted to mention that itis obsolete. MultiBlog is its replacement.

Posted on May 20, 2005 01:50 PM | #

8. Fanblogs said:

There is a great MT solution available here - MT Global Listings. This would allow you to pull all of your entries from all blogs (or just the ones you designate) and publish them as one feed, in logical order or in an order of your choosing. I used to do the same thing at www.fanblogs.com when we had 19 blogs and needed a single aggregate feed.

I have an MT template I would be glad to share with you if you want to take a look.

Posted on May 23, 2005 07:16 PM | #

9. David H. Sundwall said:

Would you mind answering a question how you integrated Sweetdex.com with this blog?

How can MTOtherBlog/MultiBlog integrate two separate blogs when they have separate URLs/domains? Doesn’t that mean they are separate MT installations, or can you have two blogs with their individual domains but on one MT installation?

I am looking to do something similar so I would greatly appreciate any answers.

Thanks!

Posted on May 24, 2005 06:48 PM | #

10. David Raynes said:

Fanblogs,

MultiBlog started as an integration of OtherBlog and GlobalListings. It has moved far beyond that now, and, especially in the development version, there are many, many features that neither plugin had originally. You can see some of what is going on in the development version on my blog.

David,

MultiBlog can integrate any number of blogs, as long as they are within the same MT installation. MT can certainly handle multiple domains, but that is mostly dependant on your hosting setup. For the most part (at least with the static templates), MT is only writing files to the filesystem. Whether or not those files are served up on different domains is up to the web server software.

Posted on May 25, 2005 12:42 PM | #