multi blogs

[Enquest]

Hello I'm trying to run a site where users can start their own blog.

How ever I want the people who visit my site to give an overview of who has the latest entery, which are the populair blogs. etc...

How should I do this? I can write a script that
1 by checking the databases of each blog each time a visitor comes
2 by making every hour an enventory of all posts in the blogs
3. by checking each RSS file and comparing dates
4. by hacking S9Y code to also insert a general mysql table...
5. by some how creating a general RSS file

I would like to ask the experts how they would do this. I will be happy to share the code I write for it! Could you tell me how to handle this in a few steps. I wil write the code and send it to S9Y for evaluation

[garvinhicking]

Regarding your options:

1. This is a good idea, but depending on how many visitors you expect it can be quite costy to check X databases with all their entries. Thus I don'T recommend this.

2. This sounds quite reasonable, I'd favor this way. Posts will only be updated everyhour, but this should normally suffice.

3. This would be even more costy than doing 1.) and I wouldn't suggest this in realtime. You might think about running an aggregated "Planet" site. There's even a Serendipity plugin to turn a s9y installation into a planet. See http://planet.koehntopp.de for example.

4.The wiser way would be to create a plugin which duplicates the posts into one central table. But you'd have redundant entries then, and if someone updates the posts it would be hard to keep all entries in synch. I'd not suggest this.

5. This would be like option 2.) and could live from the same database queries. Would be a nice thing to have, though. If you use a "planet" aggregator, you'd even have this already.

I think the best thing you could do is to use the "Planet" software (serendipity_event_aggregator) and make the feed URLs be updated from a cronjob running every X hours to contain all your offered Blog URLs (you can just feed the serendipity_event_aggregator_feeds table for that).

Best regards,
Garvin