veiled4allah: aggregating Muslim blogs

A very occasional feature here at veiled4allah is the "Muslim voices" series, which highlights interesting posts on Muslim blogs. The reason that this feature has only appeared a few times is the amount of time and effort it takes to go through my list of Muslim blogs and read them for interesting posts. No one else has ever volunteered to do it either so it doesn't get done. Unless and until there's some way of automating it, the feature will remain more a dream than a reality.

There is a way of making it easier to keep up with new posts in a lot of blogs. That's to use an RSS aggregator or newsreader (a free online one I'm using currently is BlogLines). But this requires that the blog has an RSS feed. And that's where the problem is. Blogging services like :MT: and TypePad automatically generate RSS feeds for blogs, but Blogger doesn't.

As it happens, most of the Muslim blogs on my list are Blogger blogs. Even during a period last year when Blogger fubar'd the permalinks on all its blogs, only a couple of Muslim bloggers switched to another system despite my attempts to exhort and/or shame them into doing so. Permalinks are the only way that people can link to content in a blog; otherwise you're left with saying "look for the third entry on such-and-such date, which starts..." A blog without working permalinks is only half-functional, so it was very frustrating. How can you aggregate content from people who have malfunctioning blogs?

And if Muslim bloggers aren't even interested in making sure their blogs are properly functional, how can I expect them to look into extra functionality like RSS feeds that make their blogs easier to read?

Brother P6 is working on a "reBlog". This integrates MT with an RSS aggregator and makes it easy to pull blog entries out of RSS feeds and re-post them to an MT blog with proper attribution. P6 is aggregating posts by black bloggers so people can read them all in one place. This is the sort of thing I'd ideally like to do with posts by Muslim bloggers.

Assuming that they had RSS feeds, of course