Blogs for a community of bloggers

[laylowdown]

Is there a way to create a blog who’s posts are created automatically by new posts from other blogging sites? This would be used to represent a community of bloggers who have there own sites.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Are all the other blogs on your network, or are you talking about pulling in someone else’s posts from their own site? Because the former is do-able, and the latter is called splogging and we don’t like that.

[laylowdown]

Thanks for the info. I wasn’t trying to take anyone’s content without permission. A friend of mine who started a food blogging community was asking about a way to have a central site that displayed some of the current posts for the bloggers in the community. Maybe it could be set up with a small teaser on the community blog, and redirect readers to the owner’s blog to read the post.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Yeah, that’s generally okay. But doing it automated is a bad idea, since it doesn’t add anything of value to their site or yours. Better would be an excerpt, some of your own thoughts, and then a link. Like a pull-quote. You want people to find use in YOUR site, or you’re just a collection of links.

[laylowdown]

These blog post links would be only a small portion of what the site offers. It would allow people outside of facebook to learn about this blogging community with info, calendars, links to the blogs, food related news, profiles, etc. The purpose of this part would be to have some content that wasn’t as static and could drive traffic to a bloggers site.

I am thinking maybe just the latest 3 posts, from the entire community of bloggers.

[Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)]

Look up RSS importer plugins for a start. At its heart, though, this isn’t a MultiSite question (which is to say it has nothing to do with running your own network of multiple blogs).

[laylowdown]

Thanks for the help. Next time I will make sure I start in the correct forum.