Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin), is now back as an aggregator of four blogs by the original GTxA authors, including this one. Check it out. Update: Thanks to Josh McCoy of UC Santa Cruz, who set up this new formulation of Grand Text Auto.
Nick Montfort
That makes it a Grand unified feed of Text that is Auto matically generated. It finally lives up to its name!
Are you guys going to feed the comments somehow too? It seems that GTxA has always been a comments-heavy blog, with conversations in the comments often become as interesting, or more, than the original posts.
Congratulations are in order to Expressive Intelligence Studio student Josh McCoy for setting up the aggregator. It turns out that no solutions worked out-of-the-box for this; Josh did alot of working piecing together plugins, contacting plugin authors for bug fixes, etc. to make this work.
Ian, I agree that feeding the comments would be useful. We’ll look into it.
-Michael
@Ian: I researched that at one point, and the aggregator software makers seem not to want to touch it, since supporting two-way comment aggregation (where you can post on the aggregator, too) with multiple blog-software backends and multiple registration policies is a nightmare. The Planet aggregator in particular explicitly doesn’t plan to support anything that can’t be done one-way solely from the backend-agnostic data in the RSS/Atom/RDF feeds.
Drupal can do it if you’re solely aggregating Drupal-backed blogs and using Drupal’s own aggregator, but those are some strongish restrictions…
I would appreciate having even a one-way feed of comments. In the rare moment when I feel I have something truly worthwhile to add, I’d be willing to sign in at individual sites.