good morning.

today i retouched the files of an rss aggregator i started to create with helma last year. goal is to put its functionality into antville.

benefit is to provide access to news, magazines and weblogs located outside of antville from antville's core functionality (ie. an antville weblog).

currently, the aggregator reads periodically reads user-added rss files and turns them into stories (ie. not antville stories, the rss application is not related to a weblog infrastructure, yet).

but: wouldn't it be pretty intersting to turn the rss feeds into antville weblogs and each rss channel item into one of such an rss weblog's story?

the pretty result of such an approach would be that i don't have to make any distinctions between user-driven and rss-driven stories. this means i also have to provide only one way to display a collection of stories, be it from one weblog or from a bunch of (e.g. topic-selected) weblogs, and be it a user-driven weblog or one derived from an rss feed.

the bad thing, however, could be that suddenly there are types of a "ghost" weblog here at antville containing all the work somebody helds at another place (the origin of the rss feed), too.

i am sure this could be avoided by implementing the rss channel prototype as an extention from the standard antville weblog prototype and the rss story prototype as another one from the text prototype (just as the story and comment prototypes are already). the only difference would be then that these rss stories are not visible to the public... i am not sure about this that's why i kindly request your appreciated opinions and comments.

(and feel free to ask me anything if i should have been not very clear in the first paragraphs.)

not sure if i understood you correctly, but imo the main problem with this is that regular antville-stories can be commented, and how would you disable this if an rss-feed is actually "converted" into an antville-weblog (imho we should keep comments at the source, otherwise it could be very confusing)? plus, how could such rssfeed-weblogs be distinguished from the original source (this would just be a problem if the source is an antville-weblog)?

so imho best would be to keep the rss-aggregator as a standalone application (separate from antville), and find a different way to enable "metablogs" or superblogs.

but i would love to see a tight integration of rssfeed-subscriptions into antville (meaning that everyone owning a weblog should be able to subscribe some feeds and receive those feeds as special "stories" in a separate pool in antville. from there one should be able to easily transmit the text/link into a regular antville-story (imagine a "create a story"-link that opens up the story-form prefilled with a special formatting of the rss-text/link).

ich hab folgenden test mit dem text gemacht: wenn ich das lese und das gefühl bekomm: jaja, aha, dann heisst das, ich kann mich wieder konzentrieren und bin gesund. ergebnis: ich geh ins bett.

however you resolve that, i'd like to note, that i am very interested in a good web-based rss aggregator / reader (esp based on the hop).