I've been steadily churning out code for the Planet Semantic Focus aggregator and interface, and I'm happy to say that it's nearing completion. Believe me, I can't wait to release that site!

The aggregator uses SimplePie to process various feed types and I have to say it's been a pleasure to work with! It has made getting a feed aggregator off the ground a much simpler task.

I've written some code to parse through the content of a blog entry and extract tags marked with rel="tag". The aggregator also counts the categories for an entry in a feed as tags (this may change, but I see the usefulness).

Registered users will be able to interact with the content in the usual ways:

• Commenting
• Tagging
• Burying content for being off-topic
• Promoting content you find excellent
• Categorizing uncategorized (or poorly categorized) content

I should also mention that the site will have English and non-English language content. I will make it so that all non-English content will not be shown unless you specify that you want to read posts in Chinese, Spanish, etc.

I'm experimenting with aggregating comments for blog entries, as well as allowing you guys to comment on individual entries. The entry's page exposes SIOC metadata to interlink the discussion between Plant Semantic Focus and x Semantic Web blog (really cool)!

There really is a lot more to creating a robust content aggregator than I thought going into this project, but I'm happy to say I've loving every minute of it (yes, even staying up until 4am testing code). Stay tuned for more updates!