Take control of what you have written!

Problems

Internet is a great place to post reviews, poems or technical documents. However, have you ever thought of any of the following inconveniences?

• I want to move my blog from one service provider to another, and it is so hard to do.
• I posted the same review to many different forums, and now I found a spelling mistake in it. In order to correct it I need to visit each of these forums again to make the changes.
• The same review I posted in different places received comments, but I need to go back to each of these forums to see them

or, have you ever dreamed of the following functions?

• I write game reviews and diary. I think my 2 sentences diary kinda stops people from visiting my site again, but I can't stop myself writing these. Sometimes the diary might even combine with game related thoughts.
  Can I have one central blog containing everything, one containing game related stuffs, and one containing the diary only?
• I want to keep two blogs, one acting as a decoy for my family to read, and one containing everything I write. One post can appear in both, but the two blogs need to be at different domains.

Currently there is no solution yet. However, I think we do have the technology to solve these problems.

Store everything in one basket

Why not keep all your writings in one place first? Let's use a central repository to achieve this, and then push out the writings through web feeds.

The central repository is where the author writes stuffs. This might look like the backend of Blogger, MSN Space or Wordpress. There is also a feed factory on the server, generating lots of different feeds.

One feed can contain first 10 entries for blog 1 to display, and another feed can contain the 10 entries for blog 2. There is also small feeds containing just a single writing. Small feeds are for forums to display single writings.

Therefore blog 1 and 2 are really just feed receivers, much like Google Reader. It converts feeds into web pages. Forums supporting feed receiving can also display small feeds as posts.

In fact, this page you are seeing right now, is a demo of using this technique. The page is dependent on the atom feed, using XSLT to transform it into XHTML you see now.

The comments collection requires more research on different approaches. In theory we can use pingback or trackback to inform the repository of new comments.

Steps

The author basically needs to do the following when he/she puts the writing up

1		The author put the writing into his/her repository. The repository returns a small feed link, which is the feed url for the writing. At the same time relevant standard feeds are also updated.
2		Through settings the different feeds for blogs will be updated automatically. For example, if the writing is marked as personal, it will only appear in the personal blog. This way all blogs are updated automatically.
3		The author can also post that writing elsewhere on other forums. The author just need to let the site and forum know about the small feed address obtained in step 1.
4		The blog and the forum will then automatically grab the newest edition of the writing and show it to the readers.
5		When the author changes the content of that writing, the blog and the forum will be updated automatically as well.

Learn more

If you are interested, read further on the details page. You can also chuck any discussions, questions or suggestions onto the Google Forum.