Here’s my wish: reBlog integrated into Bloglines

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I’m a reBlogger. I don’t post much original content and that was never my intention in the first place. My weblog was meant to be a repository of information. I’m a curator, a distributor of relevant content mostly for myself and maybe others who have similar interests.

With that in mind, I have been looking for an easy way to post content from my aggregator of choice to my weblog. Radio Userland was my first weblog and aggregator tool of choice. When I moved to my own domain I decided to implement my weblog with Movable Type and use NewsGator as my aggregator. I liked reading my subscriptions in Outlook, but I was never able to successfully post to my weblog from NewsGator (Note: I was able to publish posts but it was not a smooth process and I had to reformat them in Movable Type and republish).

I just recently discovered reBlog and I find it pretty intriguing. I had to upgrade my installation of Movable Type to the 3.0 version (pretty painless, but I still have some formatting issues I need to resolve) in order to use it. So far I like what I see. It combines an aggregator with the ability to post or “reblog” content directly to your MT weblog. It does require installing on your own server (PHP and MySQL) but the installation was painless.

I have two complaints:
1. It looks like it escapes special characters when posting to MT. I have to clean up the entries on occasion.
2. The UI is just OK. I am getting used to it, but it’s not the most intuitive.

I wish Bloglines would incorporate reBlog into their web-based aggregator. I prefer their new UI for reading my subscriptions and they are on the right track with their clipping folder, but I don’t want to publish to a Bloglines supplied weblog, I want to publish to my existing site.

They should provide a way for me to hook into MT and add the reBlog like tags that indicate where post originated, etc.

This would give me a web-based solution with little to no software that needs to be installed, the ability to clip posts of interest, and the ability to quickly “reblog” them to my weblog.