Yesterday I set up a new blog aggregator for Elyn. It is called “All About Psychotherapy and Counseling“, and aggregates blogs from various therapists, including her.
Setting this stuff up is pretty easy — I used WordPress, because the hosting service makes it very, very easy to install, and because Elyn already knows how to use it. Then she found a WordPress theme she liked; I installed that and tweaked it a bit with some newfound PHP knowledge. And finally, I installed the excellent FeedWordPress plugin to handle the actual aggregation. There were a couple tricky bits — I had to use a trick to get the author attribution to work properly (I don’t know yet if this is a FeedWordPress problem or a blogspot problem) — but nothing too extreme.
I’m a fan of WordPress.
Go read the new planet.
2 Comments
My husband is awesome! I and all these other therapists are in awe of what he just did for us. I thought I might also mention that the inspiration for doing this in the first place was Planet Classpath.
Hi,
Since you mention it, I thought you might be interested to know (if you don’t already) that the problem you noticed with mis-attribution of authors has been fixed in the most recent release of FeedWordPress, version 2008.1105.
(If you’re curious, the problem was more of a relationship problem between FeedWordPress and BlogSpot than a problem exclusively with either. If FeedWordPress can’t find a syndicated author in the WordPress database by name, it then looks for someone with a matching e-mail address before it goes ahead to create a new user account. Unfortunately BlogSpot uses a single generic e-mail address for every user who does not want their own e-mail address listed (noreply@blogger.com). So older versions of FeedWordPress took the matching e-mail addresses to indicate that the authors were the same person. The newer version is more circumspect; there’s a list of generic e-mail addresses that it doesn’t take to uniquely indicate the author of the post. (By default, the list consists entirely of “noreply@blogger.com.” But if you notice this issue coming up with other generic e-mail addresses, you can add them under Syndication :: Authors.)
Hope this helps!
Charles “Rad Geek” Johnson
Author, FeedWordPress