— We have a new feature here at the Navel called “RoboPundit.” This is a little bit of technology that features summaries and links to recent articles from a number of different blogs that I enjoy reading. The summaries are assembled automatically, hence the name. This works through Peerkat, which grabs the summaries automatically generated by Movable Type and some other blog tools (but not by Blogger, alhough Mr. Blogger has an RSS feed on his personal blog), and makes an RSS feed out of them. This feed is then grabbed by a server that converts the feed into Javascript. The blogs are scanned every hour, but the service that converts the feed only runs once a day, unless I force it to refresh more often (or unless somebody else does, because anybody can force a re-build of the RoboPundit feed.)
All of this software is flakey, pre-release stuff, so I expect a little randomness, which we can pretend is punditry. I just did this to do it, not because I think it’s Really Cool or anything like that. Of course.
UPDATE: To force an update of the RoboPundit feed, just click here.
Argh! Once again, bitten by intermediate adoption! If I’d waited just a few months longer to start reading blogs I wouldn’t be rearranging my bookmarks all the time!
I looked at Peerkat yesterday and thought it might be somewhat useful, but this is really splendid! Of course there’s the moveable type/blogger thing, but it’s reason enough to convert to moveable type. I like it that the first item is the stupendous ‘Glasses Rule’ from Miss Harris; is there a way to make Autopundit tell us the pundit’s name?
I was looking into how to set up something like that on my own blog, but decided to drop it until more people got on Moveable Type or others doing RSS. I really like what you’ve done.
Thanks! 🙂
I should try that, since I use MT. Hmmm, site redesign emminent…
I think I misspelled that last word. Immanent? Errr… I need more coffee.
Interesting demonstration, Richard.
Just when I thought Omphalos couldn’t get any better. Thank you Richard, and the developers of Phython, Peerkat, MT, etc. for a great time saver.
Another reason to dump Blogger.