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Syndicating archives blogs

August 14th, 2006 | Archives, SAA2006, Site News

I still haven't had enough time to process everything I took in or ideas I came up with as a result of the SAA conference. Many were more diligent than I and I'm sorry to say I didn't meet them, but some highlights follow:

I'm not even up to speed on the rest of the archival blogs out there. In a stroke of genius and madness I've got an idea that I may put into motion. I'm thinking about setting up an instance of Planet, a Python-powered web-based news aggregator. It's pretty common in the FLOSS world, and has been picked up by the code4lib folks; they're running theirs as planet code4lib. One of the reasons I think this is a good idea is that one doesn't need to use an aggregator (Bloglines, NetNewsWire, what have you) to get all of the content at once. This in turn eliminates a hurdle from those archivists that are not technically minded: they just need to be told to go to a single website to read everything.  What do you think? Would you be willing to take part?

6 comments ↓

#1 Andrew Bangert on 08.14.06 at 5:05 pm

I had been planning to do this with Drupal (because I don’t know how to set up Planet and because using Drupal would mean it could easily be extended to offer other staples of online community). I would have set it up for SAA if there had been wireless. I’m about to have some time on my hands…

#2 Mark on 08.14.06 at 5:16 pm

I am willing to play around with Planet for the heck of it. I know Drupal has this functionality so that would make sense. I actually meant to mention SIclops in this, too, but it slipped my mind. If Planet can easily import/export something like OPML, then getting it to play nicely with other community portals/CMS instances would be pretty easy too.

#3 Andrew Bangert on 08.14.06 at 5:20 pm

For a Drupal example, I’ve been aggregating most of those blogs for our chapter of SAA (the rest of the site needs some work): http://si.umich.edu/saa/?q=archivists

#4 Andrew Bangert on 08.14.06 at 5:25 pm

SIclops is going to move soon, to where it will stay (and split into a development and production sites), but is currently: http://si.umich.edu/saa/siclops/

If you start playing around with Planet, I’d like to see any documentation of your efforts that you’re willing to put out there. It was what I was originally going to use after seeing it in effect at http://www.slisblogs.com.

#5 Mark on 08.15.06 at 11:31 am

I’ve set up a sample Planet instance at http://thesecretmirror.com/planet/ . It’s just got two blogs at the moment (mine and archivemati.ca). It can export to just about anything (RSS, OPML, HTML) since it’s designed to run on templates. It’s pretty fast, I guess. The script isn’t run from the web – it needs to be called via cron.

#6 thesecretmirror.com » Announcing ArchivesBlogs on 08.21.06 at 10:32 am

[...] Since my last post about syndicating blogs about archives, I’ve played around with the idea and different software packages to do it, including Planet and Plagger. I’m happy to announce that after a few days work I was able to put something together. [...]

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