Fusing Blogging and Aggregating

Actually, offering news aggregation on a blog is quite uncommon where blogs normally are interweaved using Trackback and Pingback. But these are techniques not available to TWiki currently. Frankly, the aggregation techniques that we use here are not part of the official plugin either, i.e. the HeadlinesPlugin that is maintained by PetherThoeny. I posted a patch to HeadlinesPluginDev but got not through to him so far.

Nevertheless the aggregations that I gathered so far here integrate news reading into news blogging. These are two things which needn't to be related to each other as closely as they are for me to other bloggistanians. But, well, you've got the option. And last not least reading other's blogs and news is important to be a valuable blogger. So it isn't only a point of techniques but one of digesting the writing also. And so this blog setup allows to do that in a unified way. Also: some blogs are kind of ``difficult'' to read as they might have great content but look awful or hide it between massive ads in their sidebars and all around.

An obvious alternative to visiting the aggregations on this site is to use your personal news reader on your desktop. Right, and they have the decisive advantage that they remember which articles you've read already. I know and I am thinking of how to extend things to do exactly that online once you've logged in to Michael Daum Consulting. Maybe we do that in a way that the TwistyPlugin will get a feature to fold stuff persistently.

BlogDev: I've put a TWikiForm component on top of the HeadlinesPlugin so that you just create a new NewsFeed topic, insert the url, name, optional custom tagline and comments and it will be added to this blog neatly. Additionally, you can categorize NewsFeeds using the same SubjectCategories that you use to tag your own postings. So all postings and feeds of a category are gathered on one page: read your related postings, visit related blogs and news sites.