Life Feed coming soon

When I last did a revamp of my homepage, I went for a simple set of content.

• A brief introduction
• My most recent blog entry
• Lists of recent content I'd created from around the WWW

I was never entirely satisified with this so last weekend I started work on a system which would take that basic concept and turn it up to eleven.

One requirement I had was that the page be generated on the server. This removes the depandancy for me to leave my staging system running and connected to the Internet (this means I have a very slightly small carbon footprint and quite a simpler, easier to manage system.

I could keep a clone of the CMS database on the server, but that would only deal with getting access to content generated locally. It would not help with content that I write on third party sites.

So, to RSS, Atom and JSON it is then. Pretty much everywhere I produce content provides its data in at least one of these formats. In the interest of simplifying my code, I pushed all the feeds though Yahoo! Pipes. This allowed me to convert all the data to the same format for parsing, and splashed a few extra elements in which made some things simpler (the y:time element springs to mind).

I've nearly finished the script that handles this, my main tasks are finishing off the template and then refactoring the code to remove a few bits of duplication, and I'm pretty sure that I'll see it live before the weekend is over. I suspect that Hack Day is going to give me enough time to finish this (although with one or two other projects I've been playing with).