Like many bloggers I know, I juggle multiple web properties (sounds so fancy!) that I want to share with friends or family. While I’m best known for being a weight loss blogger, I’m also a marketing blogger, lifestyle blogger, fashion blogger, and blogger on behalf of consulting clients. Additionally, I want to share the posts from group blogs I contribute to. As multi-faceted writers, what is the best share all of our passions without leaving anything out?
Tumblr is a former love of mine. In the not-so-distant past, Tumblr allowed for content syndication to Tumblr Blogs. Simply put, I could submit RSS feeds to Tumblr, who would repost them all on a single Tumblr Blog. Simple and easy. Unfortunately, this feature is now disabled to new blogs that didn’t already have this setting in place. (It should be noted that I do have this setting still, however the syndication is spotty at best).
Tumblr Feeds Example
Recently, ShePosts contributor Heather pointed out a new-to-us service called collected.info. According to their website, “Collected is a service where you easily gather feeds and news sources in to collections where you (and others!) can get a good overview and follow them on a daily basis.” Excited at the prospect of being able to aggregate different feeds into a single source, and then hopefully embed onto my personal website, I quickly signed up and created a page. There it was, all nice a neat. It even provided me with a single RSS feed that combined all the content I was syndicating.
Collected.info snapshot
I went to create a widget using the Collected.info tools and realized it wasn’t working. I turned to get help from Twitter, and was greeted by a stale status update from March 18. Their Facebook page gave me even less information. Their blog hasn’t been updated in 1 year. Bubble burst.
In my continued search for some sort of content aggregator, I came across a Google Web Elements Reader Element. It creates an element you can put on your website that will aggregate all of your shared posts from Google Reader. The hiccup? To share posts from Google Reader, you have to +1 them publicly on Google +, therefore creating a mass of untailored junk to your Google + stream. This defeats the glory of the Google + circles: tailored content to tailored audiences.
Google Reader Web Element
My search continues. Have you found a content aggregation tool that will let you combine multiple source feeds into a singe place?
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You can use Chimpfeedr www dot chimpfeedr dot com to add multiple rss streams into a single rss stream that you can then create a widget to embed on your website. I like widgetbox to make widgets.
I myself would prefer not to aggregate everything into one place as I do not want to draw traffic away from individual blogs. I instead use a wordpress plugin called Syndicate Out. I can decide to syndicate everything or just individual categories and can add the blogs I want to syndicate to. I can even make a specific category for syndication and just check in the post when I want it to syndicate across other blogs. http:// www dot flutt dot co dot uk/development/category/wordpress-plugins/syndicate-out-wordpress-plugins/ (I broke the links above so this post wouldn’t be flagged for spam), so you will need to insert the dots and take out the spaces) Hope one of those helps.
Thanks Heather for the heads up on Chimpfeedr. I totally understand not wanting to take traffic away from individual blogs – I am just looking for a way to put all my content in 1 place if someone wanted to review it. Thanks again for chiming in!
Emily:
Have you tried Yahoo’s Pipes product? You can aggregate lots of stuff, then post it to a single page. See details at http://pipes.yahoo.com