Alex Barnett blog

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Time to play with RSS in Community Server 2.1

One of the reasons I decided to get my new domain 'alexbarnett.net' and get Community Server running is I want to be able aggregate all the 'pieces of me' scattered around cyberspace into a single place and then offer that up as a single 'uber me' feed (by the way, if you are reading this in your feedreader you are reading a post from my new blog...)

I now have around 1,400 subscribers to my FeedBurner feed since going live with it Sept 2006 and don't want my subscribers to have to update their readers - I just want to aggregate the various feeds into the FeedBurner feed (Feedburner doesn't allow 'splicing' of any feeds, only those they they have sanctioned - time for a change there).

The way to do this in Community Server 2.1 is to use the 'Mirrors' feature. You can create blog that you add feeds to. The new blog doesn't have to be made 'discoverable' or 'published' but the output RSS feed is available by CS so it can just act as an aggregator and publisher of several external (and internal to CS) feeds. Since the blog outputs a feed of its own I can then update my FeedBurner feed to subscribe to the blog's feed. Once you have this capability, you can create all sorts of aggregated feeds (with owners' permission). Here's the kind of thing I've done with my various feeds:

To acheive the above I followed Jason Knight's instructions (a Community Server MVP) in this screencast.

Posted: Sep 02 2006, 12:20 AM by admin | with 1 comment(s)
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alexbarnett.net blog said:

I finally got around to sorting out my new Alex Barnett blog on alexbarnett.net!...

# September 2, 2006 12:33 PM