Greetings, all:

I currently have implemented an install of MT 2.6.4, with a MySQL backend, running on Mac OS X Server 10.2.x.

I am interested in creating a sort of aggregate front end to a number of potential blogs, such that it would be possible to automatically feed those blogs (through RSS?) into the main page with an excerpt. The reader could then quickly scan the front-page excerpts and click on a link to get to the blog site in question.

It would be great if this would also allow for automatic random rotation of the blogs shown, or some other mechanism for configuring which excerpts were posted and how often they were to be refreshed.

What would be the best strategy to construct something like this?

Does anyone have real-world examples I could look at?

Thanks.

Kottke is doing something similar to what you're looking for.

He has several blogs set up -- main blog, remaindered links, movie reviews, book reviews, etc. And they are all pulled onto his index page. So if he blogged entries in movies, and books those entries would show up right along with his regular blog entries. He doesn't use excerpts though -- the full entry is there. But thats just a matter of changing the coding.

Here's his entry where he talks about how he's laid out his site.

Huh, I actually just looked at that page a few days ago.

At any rate, I'm afraid that he doesn't go into enough of the type of detail that I am going to need.

I guess I will have to be doing some serious css and template hacking, as well...?

Thanks

Anyone else doing anything like this, or know anyone who is?

Will all of the entries to put together be on the same installation of MT?

If PHP is an option, you might check out my blogstyles portal tutorial. You could also look at some of the plugin options for random entries and other blogs.

Kristine

Kristine,

Thanks for your post. I think this is the type of thing I'm looking to do: several blogs that have their latest entries posted to some main page somewhere, from which the reader can enter and select the entries of interest. In other words, a portal page.

If I understand your tutorial correctly, I don't necessarily have to change the layout of the blogs themselves; I just add a bit of code and change the page names. Is that correct?

Thanks.

Hi Sarah,

Nope, you shouldn't have to modify your layouts at all. You can use the Create New Index Template and make a new template with just the MT codes for what you want to display, and then create a layout for the portal page.

You can see an example of mine here; all of the MT entries and comments are generated inside of their respective blogs, and included in with PHP.

Kristine

I've put together an actual tutorial (with template examples) on how to make a single column that mixes posts from different templates from different weblogs -- bascially what Kottke is doing, but without having to use the MT-SQL plugin.