code in the ruins

Been playing with Yahoo! Pipes. I was intrigued by a Lifehacker post I saw a while back about creating your own master feed by pulling in feeds from around the web and squishing them together. So I did it.

My master feed now includes:

• My posts on this blog
• My posts on my other blog
• My posts on last.fm
• My photos on Flickr
• My videos on YouTube
• My del.icio.us bookmarks
• Songs I've submitted to last.fm, and
• Comments I've written on my blogs.

I also created a pipe for the posts by themselves, which I can use to import all of my posts into Facebook as notes (Facebook only imports items from one feed at a time). Kinda cool. I imagine there's more stuff out there to pull in, but it's a pretty good start.

del.icio.us was laid low by a power outage recently. Details and updates are on their blog. Obviously this causes trouble for mog.rif.icio.us. Here's hoping they get everything back online soon.

Google announced yesterday that they would provide an API for people to develop their own modules for the Google personalized homepage.

So, to try it out, I wrote one for mog.rif.icio.us. As promised, it was pretty easy. It uses your existing WordPress site with the mog.rif.icio.us plugin already installed. All that's needed is a wrapper script that places the content in a chunk of XML so Google knows how to handle it.

As a demo, you can add a module to the personalized homepage using my URL:

http://code.mogrify.org/wp-content/mog-google.php

It will initally appear as an iframe with a scroll bar, but you can make it display inline on the page, too. Check out the API documentation for how to do this.

I've got more detailed information and instructions on the mog.rif.icio.us project page.

As part of setting up this site, I wrote a plugin for WordPress to display all my del.icio.us bookmarks in the sidebar. It will check once a day to see if any changes have been made, and download the bookmarks if necessary.

Bookmarks are displayed as a DHTML menu, so that you can expand one tag at a time to see all the bookmarks underneath.

I set up a project page for the plugin, which I call mog.rif.icio.us. It's designed as a WordPress plugin, but it should work in any PHP environment (4.3 for now, no PHP5 support yet). You'll be able to download it from there, with more detailed documentation.