Not your regular RSS aggregator

There are three types of RSS aggregator software.

1. Desktop based - software is downloaded to your computer and you run the software from there (e.g. Pluck)
2. Web based - you access and interact with the software housed on someone elses server on the internet (e.g. Bloglines)
3. Web server based - you find a technogeek with the rights and privilages to download and install the software on your web server (e.g. Planet)

I knew this third type existed but I've never seen an example until I learned about Planet Dal CS at Dalhousie University's Computer Science Department. What happens is that RSS feeds from various different blogs can be aggregated under one feed and then displayed on a web site. From the horses mouth James Bowes of Dalhousie University kindly provided this information: "Planet.cs.dal.ca runs planet, which is hosted on the Sun Microsystem servers in the CS department. I found planet very nice to use, particularly because it only does one thing, and does it well. My personal blog uses pyblosxom; I don't think it's user-friendly enough for most people, though. Some other bloggers on Planet Dal CS use accounts from LiveJournal and blogger , which are nice because you don't have to do any of the setup yourself, and they provide web interfaces. " The press from Planet: "Planet is a flexible feed aggregator. It downloads news feeds published by web sites and aggregates their content together into a single combined feed, latest news first." Library application Having just received multiple RSS feeds for our libraries I can see the value of providing a single aggregated feed for our users. Flexibility is good so that patrons can decide which feeds they are interested in, however, simplicity is good as well! One feed displayed on our web site will make it easy to bring all the news together in one location. I love the Dalhousie application. I am certain there are a large number of individual bloggers creating blogs about their work at some departments in our institution and it would be nice to create a community just as the Dalhousie Computer Science department has. Credit Thanks to Richard Akerman for the heads-up and to James Bowes for the information!