In order for Wendy and I to maintain a shared information space as we work on the installation at the University of California at San Diego, I’m configuring both of our blogs to utilize the FeedWordPress plugin which acts as a content aggregator (and cross posts between our blogs). What I want to happen is anytime I post items to my “collaborations->overheard” category, they will automatically be posted into Wendy’s blog and vis-a-versa. We’ll still need to figure out what she wants to name her categories.
The other potentially tricky bit is that we may end up with some sort of circular reference if her posts and my posts are mutually syndicated. If her blog is pulling in posts from my “collaborations->overheard” category and publishing them to the same category that my blog is pulling out of, won’t we end up with an endless loop?
A quick brainstorm of how to solve the problem if mutually syndicating the feeds does indeed cause an endless loop…
- take a look at the “remove duplicates” plugin for FeedWordPress
- investigate whether categories can be hidden in Wordpress and whether it is possible to make categories which are the union of other categories. If these are possible, I could write my shared posts using a hidden category Collaborations->Overheard.outbound (which Wendy’s blog subscribes to). I could categorize (on my blothe posts that Wendy writes on her blog as a hidden category Collaborations->Overheard.inbound. At the same time, I would create a third visible category Collaborations->Overheard which is the union of both Collaborations->Overheard.inbound and Collaborations->Overheard.outbound which will be displayed on my site. This composite category will allow me to display both the inbound and outbound posts as a single category on my blog and prevent a loop between our two blogs.
- Yahoo Pipes could be used to generate the composite feed…