Keepin' up on what's happening in the CF world - Part 1: Aggregating all those blogs!

Note: This blog post is from 2006. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.

In this multi-part entry, I want to share some tips to make it easier to keep up on what's happening, from simplifying your reading all those blog posts, to keeping up on them as they change, to (better yet) obtaining summaries of the week's news put together by others to save you the bother.

In this first part, I'll introduce you to the two great CFML blog aggregators.

The Community Blog Aggregators: FullasAGoog and MXNA

So how do you find all the great CFML-oriented blogs out there? Am I going to list them for you? I don't need to. There are two primary "aggregators" of all blogs related to the greater Adobe (and previously MM) space, FullAsAGoog and the Adobe MXNA. These have for long been all you needed to keep an eye on to stay on top of what people are discussing in the blogosphere.

And any blogger who wants to reach the CF community has (or should) submit their site (their site's RSS feed) to the two aggregators. Then, whenever a blogger adds a new entry, it's automatically picked up (sometimes taking minutes or hours) by the aggregators, so people can just keep an eye on one of them to see what's news.

The 'goog existed first, but naturally Adobe's has attracted its own audience. Both have a submission/acceptance process (and indeed MXNA is more than just Adobe bloggers), but most bloggers are on both (which also means some duplication if you watch both). BTW, you can read the history of the 'goog's silly sounding name via a link on the left at the site. :-)

Limiting The Aggregators to Just CFML-oriented Content

Since both aggregators cover the full spectrum of blogs related to Adobe/MM products, you will probably want to limit them to just show you the CF-related ones (or whichever topic/s you are interested in). Though many seem to miss it, each aggregator offers a way to do that in its interface. In the 'goog, it's done via the "choose your poison" drop down at the top of the page--perhaps you never thought to look at that. :-) In MXNA, you choose the desired category link on the right toolbar.

If you just want the URLs for the CF feeds, they would be:

http://www.fullasagoog.com/index.cfm?blogcat=ColdFusionMX

http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mxna/index.cfm?query=byCategory&categoryId=1&categoryName=ColdFusion

The URLS offered just above are to see the web-based (HTML) interface for reading each aggregator. You could certainly just set them as a bookmark to visit whenever you have a free moment, and I have a couple of tips on that, but then there is yet another approach which you may not know about: using RSS feeds--even via email. More on that in the next entry.

(I've decided to chop this up rather than make one big long entry, since some will be more interested in some aspects than others. I don't want anyone to miss out if they were to stop reading at some point in a long post. Following posts will cover making quick browser links to the aggregators, using RSS feeds, and getting weekly summaries already "baked" for you.)

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