The New New shanemarriott.com

I was quite pleased with the SimplePie mashup I had created for shanemarriott.com, unfortunately, I found a fatal flaw in the system. The flaw revolved around the reliance on RSS feeds for all the content. In principal, it worked well; however, in practice, there was a problem.

Twitter only displays the last 20 or so tweets in the RSS feed. My aim for shanemarriott.com was to maintain my own archive of content. I want to ensure that if Twitter should ever leave us (God forbid), I would still have a copy of my content safely stored on my own server! The current system would not do this so I looked into the possibility of passing all the SimplePie data into mySQL. This option looked like it would work and I started the process of designing the schema that would store my digital life. Luckily, before I had spent too much time working on this, I came across the SweetCron project. This open source project provided all the functionality I required righ out the box!

The system works really well and being updated every few hours by a scheduled task on our server. As it works on RSS feeds, nearly everything from the web can be fed in. The twitter @replies are being stored but not displayed which is a really nice touch. Everything can be configured when you know where to look.

The theme has been lightly altered but at some stage I will continue to develop it. For now though, it will tick along collecting all my ‘stuff’.

Go take a look if you are interested.

Posted on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 by Shane and has 1 lonely comment. Add your own to keep it company! Filed in: Internet |Thoughts Tags: Internet | Review | Thoughts | website

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