Serving you better

In my continuing quest to improve Radio Free Blogistan, invite greater contribution, collaborate with others, syndicate wisely, aggregate elegantly, and leverage the reams of free content being spewed out in RSS form all over the Intersphere by applying my own filters to it, I’ve added some new sidebar sections, using Tima’s invaluable MTrssfeed plug-in.
I was already using MTrssfeed to include headlines from my other blogs and sites, but now I’m syndicating headlines from Lockergnome’s RSS Resource and, most importantly for people looking for broad coverage of weblogging, microcontent, and nanopublishing, I’m slowly adding headline feeds from some of the better metablogging sites I’ve encountered.
I also plan to set up category trackback pinging, but I haven’t figured out yet whether I should just enable each of my existing categories (probably too diffuse – who will bother to figure out which category to ping?) or set up a catch-all category for anyone who wants to ping RFB. In theory, if you have a category on blogging as many blogs do, you could point its posts at my category trackback metablog. With some blog software, you can associate that outgoing ping URL with the category so that all your posts automatically notify me.
In principle you can already do this at the Blogpopuli section of the Blogroots site. I’ve thought of automatically pinging that site any time I post anything to RFB, but I’ve been concerned that that would be overkill, an unwelcome spamming of their site. Maybe you’d feel the same way about pinging here. I’ll have to make sure the instructions are sufficiently inviting.
Then of course I’d want to list the x most recent trackback pings to my catch-all category (or to all categories if I went with the first approach) on the RFB home page. I foresee needing to go to three colukns if I continue to supplement my own meagre output with all this free content.
Come to think of it, I can already list trackbacks to specific posts and comments on the home page. Where can I find the correct syntax (MT tags) for the “daisy commented on entryname” sidebar elements I see at sites like Burningbird and Mamamusings? Over at X-POLLEN at some point I put in tags that give the commenter’s name and quote the entire body of the comment, but I haven’t figured out how to link to the entry being commented on.
Of course, exposing comments and trackbacks on the home page invites spam. I’ve already been spammed at X-POLLEN, though it wasn’t too much trouble to delete the comment.
I think the original point of this entry was to draw attention to the Nanopublishing Headlines section in the sidebar, where I’ve just added Microdoc News (to Blogroots, Weblogging for Poets, A Klog Apart, the Blog Herald, and the Blogonian).