Archive for August 11th, 2005

2005.08.11

Aggregation Dreams

Yesterday I noted that KRON has put up a site called The Bay Area is Talking. One of the nice things about it is the aggregation of various blogs on the right side. I’ve been thinking of doing something like this with the front page of OOKEE.com to make is easier for people coming to the site to see what’s been updated recently on the many sites. The problem was that I didn’t know of any aggregation tools. But something popped out from the recesses of my brain and told me that Rael (creator of Blosxom, which runs most of the OOKEE.com sites) had already developed a tool for this.

Some quick searches on Google revealed what I was searching for: Blagg. I’ve installed it and am testing it; it works as advertised and I had aggregated my first batch in less than 15 minutes! The irritating thing I’m finding, though, is that it runs as a separate script. I have to either run the script to get it to work or I have to set up a cron job to run it for me every once in a while. Currently I have a cron tab running the script hourly. I figure that won’t be too hard a load on the server (which seems to be straining these days!).

So the next goal is to try and set up something like Stu MacKenzie’s sidewordz plugin and put the aggregation on the sidebar of OOKEE.com’s front page. The problem I’m seeing with this is figuring out how to make sure the link for the article in the sidebar goes to the correct website. Hmmm. I might have to hack up Blagg if I can’t get the variables correct. I wonder if Blagg is using a template of some sort…

To be continued.