Library clips

Check out this Drupal powered Public RSS Aggregator called CMS News (or what they call a meta-news aggregator).

On the left

List of the sources (various blogs/websites)…obviously you have to have a feed to be a source, as these new types of automated portals are based on the power of re-syndication…clicking on these sources will take you to the native site.

If you are making your own newsmastering portal…in your hunt for sources you may find some are suitable sources but not all their content is relevant to the portal at hand, in this case you would have to look at finding a category feed or use Blogdigger to make one, otherwise use Blogdigger or a tool such as Feed Digest to filter the feed…see more tools.

On the right

List of the titles of most recent items.

On the bottom of the right sidebar is a Navigation heading with a recent posts link
…here you can sort posts by Type, Title, Author, Last Post (this page didn’t seemed to be working)

Not sure what you can do if you log-in

In the body

Most recent items excerpts:

- The “Title” links to the native site
- The “Source” links to a page within the portal where you can view the recent items by just that source
- The “Feed” links does the same as the “source” link (bit of duplication here)
- The “Visit” links takes you to the native site

Now I’ve noticed there is no RSS feed, but if you click on an auto-subscribe button (such as Bloglines), a feed makes itself known.

Along the top

Here there are a few choices:

- Latest News (front page)

- News By Source

Lists approx. most 20 recent items [by title] from each source under a source heading…see here (this is a bit of a compilation page where you can view contents by source all in the one page).

If you click on more (under the last item in each source) it will go to a page with all latest items (with excerpts) from just that source…here is the source Boxes and Arrows.

Here you will see, the source details at the top of the page (incl. feed, and time/date of last update)…and below this is the excerpt of the latest items, clicking the title takes you to the native site, so does a link called visit (bit of duplication again)

- News By Topic

This is interesting, it seems to show that this portal is made up of to channels (2 aggregators in one)…the source list on the left sidebar are all sources for both channels, but one channel is made up from the sources that are blogs, and the other channel contains sources from the list that are more general websites (or non-blogs)…see here.

So you can see that each channel has a list of items (by title only) and under the last item on either channel is a more link.

So one channel or bundle is called CMS News Aggregator, and the other is called CM Pros Weblogs.

If you click on the CMS News Aggregator bundle it is exactly the same as the front page (although the URL is different), clicking on the CM Pros Weblogs takes you to another would be front page (I guess they have to choose one of these bundles to be the home page…but couldn’t they have merged both as a front page).

Also if the CMS News Aggregator bundle is the default homepage you would think they would choose the CM Pros Weblogs bundle on the right sidebar.

Anyway, back to the top…

- News Sources

List of sources like on the left side bar

…with an RSS feed.

Conclusion

So it seems the general RSS feed must be for both bundles together (I’m not sure)…it would be good to also have an individual feed for each bundle as well.

Not sure what happens when items fall off the front page (or each bundle page), also when they fall off the page by each source…I don’t think there is any archiving here, it’s purely just for current stuff.

This brings me to why content isn’t bothered to be organised in categories, as the content isn’t around for long…even if it did archive content how would it use categories, would it carry over categories from each blog (would the category have to be transported within the RSS feed) or could the computer make a category on the fly based on an algorithm.

Maybe you could use TagCloud by entering in all the RSS feeds of the sources and generate a computer estimated keyword categories for your portal…this sounds easy…the whole idea is that it is automated, so you don’t want to sit there indexing yourself…although Newsmastering doesn’t have to be automated, the RSS Radars you set up can go through a human screening process before they are presented in the portal - you’d want to get paid to do this!

This is a great portal (Public RSS Aggregator), for my liking it needs:

RSS feeds for each bundle, and a general RSS feed

TagCloud

Explanation of what the site is and how it works

Structure it to be more clear in there being two bundles/channels, or even a tab to differentiate between each bundle, and a page combining both bundles (maybe also include 2 source lists, one for each bundle)

Also get rid of links that do the same thing as another link right next to it

…see a related post.