Creating an Updates list for Multiple Blogs

I wanted to display a list of new entries in the past n days to my site drawn from multiple blogs, sorted by Date and then Blog, and allowing different formating for entries from different blogs, without directly querying the database.
eg:

June 16, 2006
   Blog
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
   PhotoBlog
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]
   Writings
      Title -- Categories
        Summary
June 15, 2006
   Blog
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
      Title: Summary
   PhotoBlog
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]
      [linked thumbnail]

[More]

Generating False Archives in MT

For some more advanced layouts [calenders for every month you’ve blogged; Entry lists sorted by day decending, time accending; showing only the current month on the homepage; and others.] you need to have a certain kind of archives enabled in order to use the MTArchiveList container.

But what if you don’t want that Archive type taking up space on your server, and using rebuild time / processer power rebuilding it? This techinique reduces the files to a single tiny file, and reduces, but unfortunately can’t eliminate the processer usage involved.

[More]