The stream
Written on Jul 22, 2007 // Site, Web, Wordpress.My pet project, finally completed, one less to do.
What is it? Well, social networking sites are fun, but they have one very big flaw in my opinion. You have 0 control over the content. Try finding something you dug on Digg.com, try accessing your bookmarks when Del.icio.us is down, and you’ll see what I mean. My solution: WordPress.
Seeing as all these sites use RSS I knew there had to be a way to get it all out and into my site. I chose WordPress because it does what I want and because I like the idea of every thing being saved as a single blog entry. That makes it extremely flexible and easy to play around with for output or for searching later on. After looking around a bit the solution was actually a lot easier than I’d thought, most of the work gets done by the awesome FeedWordPress plugin.
So get a new WordPress installation up and running, add the plugin, and start adding feeds. It’s very flexible. For example I want all my Twitters to end up in the twitter category, but I want all my del.ici.ous tags preserved and used as categories (for tagcloud fun). Then you only have to set a cron job for automatic updates (I use the curl method descibed in the readme) and you’re set. Everything you do gets automagically leeched into your WordPress stream installation and the next time you remember digging a photoshop howto several months ago you won’t have to wade through pages of diggs, you can just do a search on your own local stream.
Life is good.
What’s left now is adding more feeds and formatting everything so it’ll look great, but at least the back end stuff is done and working. Now I have to make a custom theme for this which will do some custom parsing, formatting, take out comments and slap on some extra views.
If you want to know more about me, my blog or the rest of the site, check out my
Robbie
Jul 22, 2007, 9:09Wha?
XIII
Jul 22, 2007, 9:16I think that’s what everybody was thinking… given the lack of comments. Mehehe.
Corvo
Jul 22, 2007, 9:20I feel like Captain Picard who is simply happy that problem nr.X is solved.
And out of courtesy and respect he lets La Forge and Data spill out all the technobable that was involved.
Hehe… Nice work!
CommSie
Jul 22, 2007, 10:38I see, more control, power and oversight is good (^°°)>
Saint
Jul 22, 2007, 16:03I was so confused man…the preview cut-off at Wordpress so I thought you were claiming you’d re-inventerated it or something hahaha
robbie
Jul 22, 2007, 22:37Wha??
jez
Jul 22, 2007, 20:29hoi x111,
where can I take a peek at your stream?
I am curious! :)
XIII
Jul 22, 2007, 10:23x111.com/stream
I just got back from a 12 day trip to the States so I’ve got a bit of updating to do.
jez
Jul 22, 2007, 13:34wooha loads of info on there.
what is its main function?
anyhow, thanks for popping back and I hope you had a great trip in yanky land.
I am off to cook some good wok with loads of chicken and noodles :)
XIII
Jul 22, 2007, 13:52Main function? Same thing as yours, a lifestream. Except mine’s more flexible and lasts longer seeing as every little thing is a seperate entry on that wordpress blog. So by tweaking the theme and slapping a few plugins in there it should become extremely dynamic.
Mmm, wokking. Now I’m hungry. Enjoy!