SP 2007 - creating a 'blogfall' of all recent blog posts from mysite blogs

Question

I want to aggregate into one webpart the posts made by staff on their mysite blogs.

This basically allows me to present the internal musings of staff to all staff. What I am trying to do is elevate the discussions or views created by staff up to an organisation view.

this means that staff don't have to go hunting blog posts, or set-up RSS feeds etc, they can simply go to the webpart and see the last 10 of 15 headline posts and choose to follow them if they so desire to the specific blog of the individual.

as I can create a list of my own posts, and limit the number shown in the webpart and am hoping that the aggregation of all other posts is not too cumbersome....

Answer 1

Each blog will have its own RSS feed, so an RSS web part can help here. There is one provided however it only aggregates one feed at a time. If you don't mind setting up a web part page to show them all separately then that will work.

Otherwise there are RSS web parts available that can combine multiple feeds together. A web search term like combine RSS feeds web part will turn these up. If maintaining the list of RSS feeds to aggregate isn't too large a task, this is your simplest option.

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Normally a first choice for aggregating content in SharePoint would be the Content Query Web Part (CQWP) but unfortunately that won't work here because each My Site exists in its own site collection, and the CQWP can only query within one site collection.

Answer 2

The only way to make this work in an efficient way is to use Search. Create a Search Scope that just grabs blog posts (by content type or content class), then use the Core Results Web Part to grab that scope and customize the WP with the style you want.

Answer 3

One other way to accomplish this would be to create an Event Receiver that is triggered when new blog posts are created. In the Event Receiver, check to see if the blog is indeed in a My Site and then push the link/title to a storage mechanism so that when you query the data with the webpart, it doesn't take forever to parse though every My Site blog.

You could then create a custom timer job that ensures the feature for the Event Receiver is activated on all site collections under the "/personal" URL (or wherever the My Content sites get created in your environment).