Blog Network Metablog: How it Works

There’s a new Blog Tribe Metablog which aggregates posts about blogging.
We built the metablog using Version 2 of the Austinbloggers infrastructure. Bloggers add a trackback ping to their posts, and those posts are aggregated into a central blog on the topic.
Version 1 used TopicExchange from Phil Pearson. TopicExchange uses trackback to aggregates posts to a URL at the TopicExchange site. This is very handy, if you simply want a list of posts on a topic. If you want to create a site that has richer formatting, you can aggregate the posts into your favorite blog tool using RSS. Unfortunately, that introduces a time delay.
So we developed Version 2, which uses a Python script developed by Chip Rosenthal, to instantly aggregate an abstract of the posts that issue the trackback pings, and to post them to a MovableType blog. Version 2 also has a right-column sidebar of announcements. The template contains a second MTEntries section running down the sidebar which displays posts having the category “announcements.”
The AustinBloggers site has moved on to Metablog Version 3, which uses Chip’s custom-written CMS and server-side includes to display the page.
But the Blog-network site uses Version 2, so it can be easily maintained by people who know Movable Type.
If you have any more questions about how this works, feel free to ask me.