A WordPress Plugin to fight the Twitter Abyss!
On this website i tend to try to write longer blog postings, combining my own artistic explorations with a review of the current research i’ve been doing (see research). The topic of the posts usually fills my mind over many days and weeks, and the posts themselves usually require some hours (or many more) to complete.
Yet of course, my mind is also daily sidetracked by every other possible influence in the form of news, feeds, books, music, movies, etc. And i don’t find Twitter a very satisfying platform when it comes to sending out little tidbits of thought and references. Everything drowns in the immense quantity of tweets and soon also disappear into the non-existing Twitter-history.
I find del.icio.us and vis.ualize.us do their job very well in their respective niches, and i am also very much in love with hypem and last.fm and their ability to track and archive and analyze my love of music. I use all of them on individual basis, yet i thought it might be cool to mesh them together – sorted by timestamps – and create one big stream of activity. Very similar to LifeStream or what is going on on a Facebook Wall, yet less annoying, more selective and of course prettier. And, while giving a snapshot of the current state of activities, it’ll also provide the opportunity to look back and sort through older entries. So nothing gets lost in this stream of consciousness.
And i’ve been wanting to write a WordPress plugin for a while, so this turned out to be a good reason to finally get on that. I learned some stuff from the visualizeusRSS Plugin, adapted some of its code to include the vis.ualize.us and del.icio.us feeds and then mixed them up with the posts from my own wordpress-category. I still have to figure out how to successfully pull the tags out of the del.icio.us feed, and i am waiting for hypem to include a timestamp on their feed, so it is a work in progress. Maybe at the end i’ll do a proper Plugin-release, who knows, but for now it’s sorta working, i am happy and you can see the results (my online stream of thoughts and activities) here:
UPDATE: Got what i wanted from the HYPEM json feed! And included the possibility to display by feed category. And set up an email-address to use with Postie, in case i feel like Email-Blogging.
