Travel blog aggregator iolaire
Source: http://travel-blogs.publicationaggregator.com.

New Aggregator For Travel Weblogs

BoardingArea may be your first stop when searching for articles pertaining to miles, points and travel — as well as some other ancillary topics — but you might want to also read other weblogs which are not part of BoardingArea; and you think to yourself, “Would it not be nice to just have links to all of the articles of which I am interested in reading in one place?”

Your wish just might have come true.

New Aggregator For Travel Weblogs

Iolaire McFadden — who is also known as InsideFlyer member iolaire — created both a new Internet web site and an official Facebook site where articles from different weblogs are featured in chronological order. This includes all of those found at BoardingArea.

One difference between them is that the Facebook version displays the featured photograph from each article, if it originally contained one — and you do not have to be a member of Facebook to view it.

“The basic format is whatever post summary the blog author posts in RSS is shown on my site, any in my RSS feed, but when a viewer clicks over to read the story they are sent directly to the source”, iolaire posted. “I still read some of the main blogs via RSS mostly at work, but then read all the other posts summaries via facebook on off hours. One big advantage of facebook is auto translation is built in, so as BoardingArea.com added more languages I didn’t need to do the translation myself. Its intersting to see the Brazilian content and some Asian language that I really don’t know what it is and via the summary decide if I want to open the link in Chrome to translate the full article.”

An homage to one former aggregator was given by iolaire: “So when @Wandering Aramean closed down hack.travel I felt like there was still a need for a similar aggregator of the travel blogs – but maybe without any labor intensive filtering out of the hundredth Prestige credit card post. At a minimum I missed the RSS feed of hack.travel where I could see more random posts from bloggers who I don’t subscribe directly to their feeds.”

Summary

I personally believe that iolaire did a great job. I would like to see some more weblogs added to the aggregator — including Doctor of Credit, TravelBloggerBuzz, and Travelers United as only three of many examples, if they have not already been added — and perhaps the capability of customizing which articles the reader prefers to see by a number of criteria as defined by the user.

“If any one has concerns about me aggregating their site please PM me here and I’ll remove it.” Despite repeating that statement at least three times, iolaire, please allow me to be the first to officially give you permission to please continue aggregating The Gate — and please continue the good work.

Thank you, iolaire.

Source: http://travel-blogs.publicationaggregator.com.

  1. Brian, thanks for the plug found it in Facebook with your screenshot showing. I’ll check the sites you suggested, the selection of sites is set on my side.

  2. FYI Travelers United’s feed doesn’t validate so I could not add it, there is some custom WordPress.com tag that shows up a few times in the RSS feed.

    The other two are added. I should also check out people’s weekly summaries of notable posts around the internet to look for sites that I don’t have.

  3. I’ll be sure to check it out as long as it filters out those worthless blogs that just pump credit cards

    1. Bob, it doesn’t do any content filtering so you will see sites with credit cards and when a new card is released you will see it many times on all the various blogs. With Seth’s Hack.Travel site he was trying to prevent exactly that and I think he found it to time consuming or technologically challenging to do the filtering. I didn’t go that route opting instead to just scroll past the content that I don’t care about.

  4. Valid effort. I will link to this post but not to the aggregator site directly at its current form.

    Suggestions to improve:

    1) For me to figure out which blog it is, I must hover over the headline. That’s a no no. Readers must be able to see which blog it is as for many we don’t give a damn, why should we waste time to hover over the headlines
    2) By having the headline and the name of the blog…it should be enough, no need for any snippets! This way we get a lot more blog posts on the first screen without having go scroll too many times to see older posts.
    3) Pointsbuzz.com and milesfeed.com do a decent job. But they are NOT comprehensive. Maybe yours can be? Some of the blogs they include do make me smh and go WTF!

    Thanks.

    1. @TravelBloggerBuzz thanks for the feedback.

      Regarding #1 I’ve added the author and the site name before the summary.

      #2 is not something I’d do given my reading style – I consume a huge amount of online content via RSS feeds, think the old google reader (I use bazqux.com now) where I scan all posts in categories (news, travel, tech, etc) scrolling by the title and the summary quickly and then if the story captures my interest I click on and read the full story. I understand why people might want only the title but from my style I also want to see the summary. Maybe the best way to describe needing the summary is it allows me to know a little bit about what is behind a clickbait title to figure out if the content is of intrest.

      Now seeing people provide feedback on the website (versus the Facebook posts or RSS feed) does make me think I need to spend a bit more time on a better template that displays the content better. Zero effort went into the template because the website is not something I’m consuming directly. A more compact layout with one post on top of each other, with the post taking up most of the page so most posts are on two lines would be much cleaner and allow many more posts on the page.

      #3 of interest it looks like both those sites are using the same theme.

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