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January 19, 2005

New Plugin Idea: Entry Funnel

While talking with Anil a couple days ago, he tossed out an interesting seed idea for a plugin and my mind just took it and ran.

So, here is the basic idea: given one or more feeds (Atom, RSS, etc.), create entries in the local blog based on those feeds. The idea is that you could pull in feeds from Technorati, Flickr, Del.icio.us, other blogs, and anything else that publishes feeds and build entries in your own blog to aggregate that content or whatever else you might want to do with it.

I would write more, but it is late and I just spent a couple hours tracking down a "minor" error in a plugin that I have been playing around with. So, any thoughts?

Posted by rayners at January 19, 2005 12:31 AM

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Comments

Have you seen Ben Hammersley's Cross Poster for Movable Type?

http://www.benhammersley.com/code/crossposterformovable_type.html

It works for (basically) this exact purpose...

Posted by: Benjamin Trott [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 19, 2005 01:47 AM

I am familiar with Ben's Crossposter, and it is part of the inspiration for what I want to do with Entry Funnel. Think of it like Crossposter on steroids. :)

Plans for Entry Funnel include:

  • Per-feed entry templates (using MT's template engine)
  • Ability to to post entries one-for-one, or to aggregate entries over a day (or maybe some other period of time)
  • Per-feed filters (creator, subject, etc.) to limit incoming entries
  • Some kind of regex-based parsing engine to allow users to pull out specific bits of information from the feed to place into the local entry

At least those are what I'm working towards right now. The list may change as I make progress.

Posted by: David Raynes [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 19, 2005 07:29 AM

Your idea sounds very similar to what we're calling RSRB (real-simple-re-blogging), a tool one of our engineers built for a client project. Inspired by the various efforts to "reblog" content, RSRB allows a user to select which feeds to "listen" and repost content to a specified output reblog, using xml-rpc for the transport.

We use it for existing bloggers contributing to a client's project (http://www.eschoolnews.com/eti/index.php). They post to their own blog as usual and specify a category from which a feed is then generated from those entries. That category feed is then what RSRB subscribes to, and with each new entry, then reposts it on to the aggregated reblog. RSRB 2.0 (built with Ruby on Rails) now supports multiple outputs (each with its own input RSS feeds), and moderation by RSS feed, or by individual post. The output essentially looks like several authors contributing to one blog.

One idea we've tossed around but haven't had any time to explore is how to aggregate threads of conversations (i.e, the rss feeds of comments) from separate blogs about the same topic (linked by trackbacks between the two entries).

Posted by: Thor Prichard [TypeKey Profile Page] at March 15, 2005 02:05 AM

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