Dented Reality

All posts tagged 'aggregation'

Simple Activity Streaming with SimplePie

Jul 12 2009
11

A few different people have asked me recently how I created the activity stream/life stream you see in the sidebar of Dented Reality. It’s actually really simple, and all it does is load up the feeds from a few different locations, combine them in date order and then output them on my page using an HTML “UL” (unordered list). Based on the source of each feed, it also adds a CSS class to each list element (LI) so that I can add an appropriate icon. Here’s the complete code that I use, and then I’ll explain some parts of it, and some of what makes it tick: Read the rest of this post…

Idea: Comment Aggregation via WordPress

Mar 12 2009
4

There are lots of “conversation platforms” out there, and more arriving daily. FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader (now that it has commenting functionality); you name it. These systems are all great for getting your content out there and exposing more people to it, but the problem (in my opinion) is that it becomes really hard to follow the conversations on all of these different platforms. They all generally act as either a kind of content aggregation platform (e.g. FriendFeed/Google Reader), or as a unique content creation/delivery system, which is heavily used to redistribute existing content (e.g. Twitter). With all this aggregating going on, why not do the same thing in reverse? Mashable has just started doing something along these lines and that prompted me to finally publish this draft post.

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Adding Blog Headlines to a WordPress Page/Theme

Feb 11 2009
5

You may have noticed that I recently added a list of “Recent Headlines” to some of the pages that describe my Projects on this site. This is handled dynamically through WordPress, so that if I ever post a new blog entry relating to one of those projects, it automatically appears on the appropriate project page.

Here’s how it works…