Want to see what your basic reBlog looks like?

Here you go.

Mind you, this isn't much different than doing things manually, but that's the point. This isn't an automatic display of an RDF or Atom feed (there's no RSS 2.0 support at this point). This is something that allows you to select which posts get displayed. you could think of it as a fairly intricate "Blog This!" bookmarklet.

Anyway, it's a start, something for me to play with as I refine my ideas.

LATER: I shouldn't have to mention this, but I think I should mention that in my earlier post about my community site plans, inclusion is determined by the one-drop rule. My agreeing with you may not be…

Also, any posts I include will be from the site more than the blogger, so Pandagon (for example) wouldn't be left out—and nor would Ezra. Note the ass-umption of Ezra's ethnicity on my part. And folks like The Heed Heeb, who just happen to not be Black but write well on a topic of interest to significant numbers of Black folk will also be in the mix.

That's a lot of folks, and a lot of time. Given the amount of time I spend on P6, something will give one way or the other. But like I said, I'm still refining the idea.

Posted by Prometheus 6 on March 10, 2004 - 10:24pm :: Tech
 
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It looks cool! Let me know if you'd ever be interested in my occasional posts on blacks and Islam.

Posted by  Al-Muhajabah (not verified) on March 11, 2004 - 8:02pm.

I'll be watching for them. You already have the fulkl text feed that will make it easier.

I'll be honest, I'm only interested in the social impact of religions as organizations so it's hard for me to post a pro- or anti- any religion post. But my approach with the aggregator and community sit ewill be to pull in what I think other people will be interested in and route folks to the source.

Posted by  P6 (not verified) on March 12, 2004 - 11:10pm.

The nice thing about the aggregator is that it does allow you to post things outside of your own interests. Most of what I post on this topic is for the purpose of educating people about various kinds of Islamic experience. People (including Muslims) tend to think of it as an "immigrant" religion and aren't aware of its indigenous roots. I'm not going into any great depth about it, just letting people know what's out there so that they can follow up on their own if they want to.

Last year I tried a couple of times to do something kind of similar to what you're doing, in that I would surf the Muslim blogs on my list and highlight interesting posts in my own blog. But it was too much work and eventually I gave up on it. Unfortunately, most of the blogs are Blogspot blogs with no RSS feed. Also, to be honest, many of them are your typical teenage girl blogs and I have a limited tolerance for that, lol.

I'd still like to see some kind of portal but until more Muslim bloggers start having RSS feeds or at least trackback capability, I don't think the project is going to get anywhere.

Posted by  Al-Muhajabah (not verified) on March 13, 2004 - 3:20am.

Start annoying them, sis. If they're on Blogger they can have an Atom feed. The aggregator behind reBlog (written in PHP, worse luck for you!) handles Atom feeds too. I'm thinking about starting another Blogger account just so I can learn how to set the feeds up right and advise folks.

Incomplete feeds (the automatic 40 word, HTML stripped extract and no author name in particular) are the biggest obstacle to doing it right. That and the lack of any feed at all, of course…

Posted by  P6 (not verified) on March 13, 2004 - 8:29am.

There was a period a number of months ago when Blogger fubar'd permalinks on all Blogspot blogs. But even then, only a couple of the Muslim bloggers were interested in doing anything about it. That's why I've mostly given up on trying to convince people to set up RSS feeds. I mean, if they don't even care about having working permalinks, why would they care about something obscure like an RSS feed? Until Blogger sets these things up automatically and links them in the default templates, people just aren't going to make use of them.

Posted by  Al-Muhajabah (not verified) on March 13, 2004 - 11:15pm.

Trackback from Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs:

A very occasional feature here at veiled4allah is the "Muslim voices" series, which highlights interesting posts on Muslim blogs. The......

Posted by  Al-Muhajabah's Islamic Blogs (not verified) on March 14, 2004 - 3:17am.

Ah, yes. Blogger's biggest, pretty well deserved, appeal is to those that have no other need to be a techie. Outside of being free, of course.

Posted by  P6 (not verified) on March 14, 2004 - 11:00am.