BoardingArea may be your first stop when searching for articles pertaining to miles, points and travel — as well as some other ancillary topics — but you might want to also read other weblogs which are not part of BoardingArea; and you think to yourself, “Would it not be nice to just have links to all of the articles of which I am interested in reading in one place?”
Your wish just might have come true.
New Aggregator For Travel Weblogs
Iolaire McFadden — who is also known as InsideFlyer member iolaire — created both a new Internet web site and an official Facebook site where articles from different weblogs are featured in chronological order. This includes all of those found at BoardingArea.
One difference between them is that the Facebook version displays the featured photograph from each article, if it originally contained one — and you do not have to be a member of Facebook to view it.
“The basic format is whatever post summary the blog author posts in RSS is shown on my site, any in my RSS feed, but when a viewer clicks over to read the story they are sent directly to the source”, iolaire posted. “I still read some of the main blogs via RSS mostly at work, but then read all the other posts summaries via facebook on off hours. One big advantage of facebook is auto translation is built in, so as BoardingArea.com added more languages I didn’t need to do the translation myself. Its intersting to see the Brazilian content and some Asian language that I really don’t know what it is and via the summary decide if I want to open the link in Chrome to translate the full article.”
An homage to one former aggregator was given by iolaire: “So when @Wandering Aramean closed down hack.travel I felt like there was still a need for a similar aggregator of the travel blogs – but maybe without any labor intensive filtering out of the hundredth Prestige credit card post. At a minimum I missed the RSS feed of hack.travel where I could see more random posts from bloggers who I don’t subscribe directly to their feeds.”
Summary
I personally believe that iolaire did a great job. I would like to see some more weblogs added to the aggregator — including Doctor of Credit, TravelBloggerBuzz, and Travelers United as only three of many examples, if they have not already been added — and perhaps the capability of customizing which articles the reader prefers to see by a number of criteria as defined by the user.
“If any one has concerns about me aggregating their site please PM me here and I’ll remove it.” Despite repeating that statement at least three times, iolaire, please allow me to be the first to officially give you permission to please continue aggregating The Gate — and please continue the good work.
Thank you, iolaire.
