Binary Bonsai

Well, for what it’s worth, my lifestream is up and running. Beware though, it does have some quirks.

For instance: The Digg feed lists items by their submission date and not my ‘digg’ date. The ‘Flickr Comments’ feed lists not only my comments, but also any subsequent comments made on the same picture. The Flickr Favorites feed, which is a third-party hack, isn’t working properly, and neither are the del.icio.us, nor the Google Reader Shared Items feeds (all of which return only a single item).

It is ravishingly vulgar, passionate and beautiful. I loved it. Wow!

Alright, so I took a look at a couple of WordPress plugins for doing ‘automatic RSS import’ of content to a WordPress blog. And really I wasn’t too impressed with most of them. Strangely, I can’t believe anyone hasn’t done a proper plugin for this yet!

Here’s what I’d love to see in just such a plugin:

• Keep track of multiple RSS feeds.
• The items from each feed is optionally pumped into their own categories. So Digg items go into ‘dugg’ and last.fm go into ‘music’.
• Three ways of posting items: one-to-one, X-to-one or daily-to-one.
• String replacement. In case some feeds output weird crap, I’d like to be able to remove it, so I can keep my db clean.
• Lenient feed parsing…

The possibilities for mixing up the parts of your life that are tracked online anyway (what you read, what you write, what you consume) are neigh limitless. And not only that, but you get to aggregate and safe keep all this data which is currently stored in the belly of companies across the world.

And once you’ve got it, you can do cross-sectioning, like listing what music was playing while you were writing a specific entry, without having to call up last.fm’s API.

Also, it would get rid of those ‘I know I saw that story/site and bookmarked/dugg/del.icio.us-ized it somewhere last week.

Anyway, I’d love to build it myself, and that might be what I end up with. But it is unfortunately way out of my area of expertise.

PS: Do not watch You, Me and Dupree. It sucks.