I am aware of the RPG Blog Alliance (RPGBA) and the RPG Bloggers Network. Neither of them does exactly what I want.
If I were to create a new RPG blog aggregator that would store the article texts in full (for search and index purposes only, I don’t want to ‘steal hits’ — display only excerpts), allow search on feed and author and post keywords, easy historical browsing, and so on, I wonder how many people would be interested.
Probably want to put keywords or the like on the feeds themselves. I imagine being able to mark (probably self-mark) a blog as OSR or 4e or Shadowrun or RPG product reviews or what have you — and probably more than one at a time — might make this more useful as well.
How many would make use of it? How many would sign up?
This is nice functionality, and might be useful all in one package. There do already exist several tools for doing this sort of thing though.
For example, search a particular blog:
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahackslashmaster.blogspot.com+secret+doors
I know Google Reader provides an integrated search for the blogs you subscribe to.
There is also the OSR Search, which I maintain:
http://osrsearch.blogspot.com/
(I realize this is probably too specific for your needs.)
All that being said, if you do set such a thing up, feel free to add me.
Thanks Brendan.
Google works really well for me if I have a good idea what I’m looking for, or where to find it. I find it doesn’t work so well for me if I’m looking for relatively non-specific things. ‘Secret doors’ would not, I imagine, turn up primarily blog posts about secret doors in RPGs, and ‘secret doors rpg’ is better, but still not really good. As you say, ‘secret doors site%3ahackslashmaster.blogspot.com’ is pretty good, but pretty precise. If C has a good search engine on his blog I might not even try this one.
Google reader wasn’t bad, but wasn’t what I was looking for, either.
OSR Search is pretty cool, but again, doesn’t do what I’m looking for — in addition to search, I’d like some browsing capabilities.
The closest I’ve found so far is to aggregate the posts myself (so they can be indexed and searched) and set up my own navigation paths through them. It works passingly well on my personal aggregator, and I think I see some improvements I can make.
I’d be in, er… or on, or… whatever ;)
cool, will do Erik.