The Song Fight Bulletin Board

I've installed a blog on songfight.net, which will aggregate and publish RSS feeds as posts. You can participate! Here's how:

1. Get a blog.
2. Create a category on your blog called "Song Fight"
3. Create an RSS feed for that category
4. Post a link to your RSS feed here.

Having a category for your Song Fight-related posts lets you post about your daily life on your blog and keep that separate from your Song Fight posts.

You could also have a "Songwriting" category if you want to send that RSS feed too. I'll add multiple feeds for you.

I'll take the feeds and add them to the syndication. Then you can all just go to songfight.net/blog and see what's up in the world of songfighters.

This way, if you ever stop posting, I don't have to do anything-- it'll just be that no posts from you ever show up on songfight.net

Visit http://songfight.net/blog to see if there are any posts.

JB

Would you want, for example, a song-a-day post that features a Songfight song to be on this list? For example: this one
-bill

Several things to choose from:

Sockpuppet (all music, remix sources, band news, mostly Song Fight-related): http://sockpuppet.us/index.xml

beesbuzz.biz, songfight category (Song Fight entries): http://beesbuzz.biz/music/songfight/rss.php

beesbuzz.biz, plus+5 category (Song Fight entry remakes):
http://beesbuzz.biz/music/plus5/rss.php

beesbuzz.biz, all stuff (includes the above two, as well as album art, code, and a few other things which aren't really Song Fight-related): http://beesbuzz.biz/stuff.xml

Plaidophile (my blog), music category (mostly songwriting, but also includes things like gushing about Radiohead or whatever): http://beesbuzz.biz/blog/e/rss_music.php

Can you categorize stuff on LJ? Reviews/examinations/ruminations of individual songs, even non-songfight songs, are totally on-topic.

LJ doesn't provide categories, but it does provide tags. I don't think there's per-tag feeds though, and I don't know how it publishes tags externally.

I never see HeuristicsInc post anything to his LJ except song-a-day though.

Ok, I'll give this a try.

http://rdurand.wordpress.com/feed

I know Jeff's is his music blog and not his whateverblog (which is truthpluslies.com everybody and it's totally fun). Ross, is that blog just gonna be music?

http://jackshite.blogspot.com/feeds/pos ... lt?alt=rss

http://brodymusic.blogspot.com/feeds/po ... lt?alt=rss

all added. go see: http://songfight.net/blog

Is there some easy way to tell at a glance where each post came from? I don't see that info but maybe I'm not looking at things properly?

jb wrote:I know Jeff's is his music blog and not his whateverblog (which is truthpluslies.com everybody and it's totally fun). Ross, is that blog just gonna be music?

Yeah, I set it up just for this. I don't see the post I made showing up in teh "song fight" categoryon the songfight.net blog. Did I do something wrong on my blog?

fluffy wrote:LJ doesn't provide categories, but it does provide tags. I don't think there's per-tag feeds though, and I don't know how it publishes tags externally.

I never see HeuristicsInc post anything to his LJ except song-a-day though.

Yeah, that's what I made the blog for; I never really wanted a blog where I told people what I was doing, I can't imagine anyone's interested. For my own music stuff I have the blog on my own site.

Can't get RSS for specific tags? Too bad. I was hoping that implementation would be there.
-bill

Someone seems to have made a third-party API tool for LJ tag syndication:

http://max.kanat.us/tag-syndicate/manual.php

Röss wrote:

jb wrote:I know Jeff's is his music blog and not his whateverblog (which is truthpluslies.com everybody and it's totally fun). Ross, is that blog just gonna be music?

Yeah, I set it up just for this. I don't see the post I made showing up in teh "song fight" categoryon the songfight.net blog. Did I do something wrong on my blog?

Ok ,we'll see if it helps when I push the "Publish" button.

Oh, it turns out LJ's own API supports tag filters now too. http://users.livejournal.com/_fluffy/da ... ag=seattle (for example)

I humbly suggest we remove the del.icio.us feeds. They flood out everything, and most of the links aren't very interesting. There won't be nearly as many posts after that, but we just need to add more Songfighter feeds, I think.

Yeah, agreed. Done.

Switched Google news "eurovision" feed (because it amuses me, that's why) to the Atom feed. FeedWordPress seems to have a harder time with RSS than Atom for some reason. Or at least MagpieRSS has a harder time parsing RSS...

[edit] changed my mind about it being amusing. killed it. added a googlenews feed looking for "songfight"-- nothing now, but we'll see it if anything comes up.[/edit]

I’ll shimmy up in here, and say good job of setting this up guys.
Not much of a blog reader myself, but if am really bore at work I might read some of the entries.

JB, would it be possible to add all the appropriate feeds from my monster post, or at least the beesbuzz.biz 'songfight' category? I don't always put my Song Fight stuff on my blog, but it always goes onto sockpuppet.us and usually onto beesbuzz.biz/music/songfight. Usually sockpuppet.us gets the song, beesbuzz.biz/music/songfight gets the song and the fight link, and my blog just gets meta-information and friends-only previews and so on.

Unfortunately there's no easy way for Movable Type to automatically generate cross-blog aggregate feeds (even generating a multiple-category feed in MT is pretty hinky, and there's no way to just generate something like a feed which contains everything under 'music' for example), but maybe I could be motivated to install my own Planet instance and muck around with that. When I think too hard about this crap I start to think about making my own CMS which isn't terrible (WordPress is still missing a lot of stuff that I need, and it won't easily interoperate with phpBB due to some severe issues with the design of both systems) but then I get overwhelmed with how much work it'd be to do things the way I want to do it and I give up and keep on settling for MT.

Also, for some reason, HeuristicsInc's posts are showing up twice.

Added the beesbuzz songfight category.

I think Bill's stuff was coming up twice because I had him in there twice.

Looks like Jeff is working on the theme, so if you have suggestions about that, pipe up.

Jeff, don't feel beholden to that theme I picked-- I just chose something somewhat at random. I do like Lauren's boxer-with-headphones thing, if you can figure out a cool way to use that...

jb

Here's a couple of mine:

feed://dproject.info/blog/category/Songfight!/feed

feed://dproject.info/blog/category/songwriting/feed

The songwriting feed has got answers to various questions asked about the songwriting process (how do you come up with lyrics, putting melody to lyrics, song form, etc) it's stuff most Songfighters! would know, but it gets asked in various forums I'm in about 5 times daily, because it's easier than using the search button to see where I've answered the questions 3 dozen times. So include it or not.

The forum is seeing the exclamation point as some sort of tag and not including the "/feed" but that whole line is the url.