One thing I don’t do on this blog is provide a list of links to stuff I find interesting around the web. It’s just too much trouble. If it is interesting enough and I have time, I’ll write a post about something. But there’s a lot of other good stuff on various blogs I come across that I never share here. What I do do is tweet them out and share some of them through NewsBlur, my preferred replacement for Google Reader. (Quick update to my NewsBlur review: I’m now using the iOS, Android, and Web versions exclusively. They’re all fine, and further improvements are forthcoming.)
Sharing to Twitter and through NewsBlur takes one click. That’s why I’m willing to do it. If you don’t use Twitter or NewsBlur, you can subscribe to my NewsBlur shared stories RSS feed. If you use either, you can follow me directly. Also, what’s neat is that each NewsBlur user’s shared stories populates a blog, called a “blurblog.” Mine is here: http://afrakt.newsblur.com/, which you can view without use of Twitter or an RSS reader. It’s just another blog.
But I already have a blog! What would be nice is to somehow merge my blurblog into TIE. The way I’d like to do that is to automatically generate a daily post that includes a list of links to each day’s blurblog items. That way, I would not need to do any additional work. But, I have no idea if this is possible and, if it is, how to do it.
The blurblog-to-TIE-post conversion machine would have to suck in my blurblog site or RSS feed each day at a specific time, find the titles and URLs of stuff I shared in the last 24 hours, package those up into a WordPress post, and drop them onto TIE with an automatically generated title, author, and maybe a preset category or tag. Even if it constructed the post text and emailed it to me, that would be good enough. It’s the aggregation into post form I want to automate.
Got any ideas?
PS: I know there are WordPress widgets that will allow you to include an RSS feed as a sidebar item or will merge two feeds. I don’t want to do that. I want to suck in a feed and output a new post of links once per day.
