Comments on: Self-Service Feed Aggregation with WPMu

By: Andre Malan

Andre Malan — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:10:49 +0000

Jim, this is a phenomenal explanaition of how everything works. As a side note, I just updated both the “add user” and “add feed” widgets to work on a password system instead of a list system. The rational is that if a professor wants students to add feeds to a course blog, all he has to do is give them the password in class and then they can add at will.

By: Reverend

Reverend — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:45:57 +0000

Also Luke,

I tested FeedWordPress and the Flash issue you were talking about, and it is, indeed, an issue with image—and widgets too I discovered. It kills the AJAX as you said, and makes the general functionality of a site with this activated rather limited in that regard. I can withstand it for the time being, and I want to believe it will be remedied soon.

Thanks for the heads up.

By: Reverend

Reverend — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:50:14 +0000

Cool Luke,

I think a direct feed into FeedWordPress is ultimately how this narrative will end. And I may have to talk to Charles Johnson about this, for like you I am a fan, and read this in undergrad, a good book, but perhaps not quite up to par with Middle Passage or FeedWordPress.

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:51:56 +0000

Totally. This really helps with thinking about our system. Once we get the thing configured, I’ll write something up.

BTW, FeedWP is good, but it’s no Middle Passage.

By: » Reading Capital, Part 2: Blogs, Feeds, and Aggregation Reading Capital

» Reading Capital, Part 2: Blogs, Feeds, and Aggregation Reading Capital — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:24:06 +0000

[...] July 10, 2008 by Reverend Marx and Engels lego photo used courtesy of Dunechaser So I’m finally returning to creating a discussion framework for the Reading Capital site. I will detail my thinking for the design of the site below (and in at least two subsequent posts), and I invite and and all recommendations and criticisms. It’s a model that is far from perfect, but provides an opportunity to look at how we might provide a platform for aggregating and re-presenting posts and discussions in a distributed manner. For the technical details behind this setup go here for more information. [...]

By: Reverend

Reverend — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 18:10:24 +0000

Hey Luke,

I believe that Charles Johnson is constantly developing FeedWordPress, so those issues should be fixd soon. Haven’t had the image issues, but I’ll double check. Also, it isn’t to much of a big deal for the reading capital site because the main blog will just be for aggregation not writing posts etc., and all the other blogs that don’t install FeedWordPress won’t have that issue.

The FeedWordPress vs. BDP RSS is a good question, and you provide me the space here to explain the logic, which is something Andre and I talked about. Namely, the best thing about BDP RSS versus all the other auto-blog/spam plugins is that it is awesome at validating and accepting almost any feed. FeedWordPress is a lot more finnicky (sp?) and chokes on far more feeds. Having an extension for FeedWordPress like Andre has created for BDP RSS would make a lot of sense in the bear future, but I am still more comfortable with running all the feeds through BDP RSS to ensure that they get validated, don;t throw an error, and aggregate everything more cleanly than FeedWordPress may on its own.

That said, different folks may have had different experiences with this process, and I don’ pretend that my experiences are true for everyone, but Andre and I separately had the same experience, which for the moment makes me comfortable with adding BDP RSS as a kind of go-between for organizing, customizing, and ensuring the feeds work.

Make sense?

By: Luke

Luke — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:21:49 +0000

Jim: this is great stuff. We’re trying to set up something similar on Blogs@Baruch but are running into the following problems.

- Enabling mbstring in our PHP to get BDP RSS working (we have the sysadmin working on that one– should be easy. But then again…)

- Feedwordpress creates a conflict with Flash interfaces in our Admin Panel on WPMU 1.51 (completely knocks out Flash media uploader in Write interface, can’t even “show” images uploaded with browser interface); forums for the plugin suggest that there are conflicts with the Flash sbm too, but I didn’t even test that once I saw the previous conflict. Seen anything like this in your backend with feedwp? What version are you running?

Automattic suggested feedwp as an alternative to BDP, not as a complement… I’m a little confused as to how/why you’re using them together, since they share some functionality… far’s I can tell, it’s so that you can use Andre’s plugin to allow users to dump in their own feeds. That’s a good enough reason; but are there others?

Thanks for blazing yet another trail on this one.

By: Reading Capital, Part 2: Blogs, Feeds, and Aggregation at bavatuesdays

Reading Capital, Part 2: Blogs, Feeds, and Aggregation at bavatuesdays — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:56:02 +0000

[...] aint one-at-a-timin’ here, we’re mass communicatin’!” (8)July 10, 2008 — Self-Service Feed Aggregation with WPMu (0)June 24, 2008 — Reading Capital, Part 1 (5)May 7, 2008 — This ain’t yo mama’s [...]