The Wardman Wire

This site is an aggregator for Scottish Political News - from both blogs and mainstream media sources.

Scottish Politics Website and RSS Feed

The site provides:

• A Scottish Politics News website at http://www.politics-scotland.co.uk/
• A Scottish Politics Newsfeed at http://www.politics-scotland.co.uk/feed/. The feed redirects to feedburner, but you should use this address.

The site aggregates a number of Scottish political blogs, providing a short summary of each article and a link through to the original blog for the full story.

Why?

My original motivation is that I need a “Headline” feed for Scottish Politics for bloggers to display in the sidebar of my blog, www.mattwardman.com. In fact the most straightforward way for me to generate the feed has been to build a small aggregation site - rather like a specialised version of politicalopinions.co.uk.

You can read more about the approach of this site by reading these three articles on The Wardman Wire:

• Feedback Please: Your RSS News Feed in my sidebar?
• New Blog Aggregator for Scottish Politics
• Code of Practice for Blog Aggregators: Guidelines for Good Blogosphere Citizens

You can see the “Headline Feed” in the first sidebar towards the bottom.

Prototype Aggregator

I have put up the aggregator as a prototype, and there may be some changes as I gain experience. Known problems include:

• Posting times on the site are a few hours out. This is something not quite right in the process of taking a post from a feed, summarising that on a website and syndicating it back to a feed.
• There is a comments feed from Wordpress, but I am not planning to enable comments and will take this off soon.

I am planning to include some Mainstream Media feeds on the site. An initial experiment suggests that they need to be kept separate from blogs as the large media organisations tend to post a dozen stories at once and swamp the blogs.

Comments?

Comments are welcome below, including any suggestions of feeds to include - or requests from anyone who would like their feed removed.