“Real-time feed parsing in the cloud for web-developers”

Simple Activity Streaming with SimplePie

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: (more…)

KRead: a simple feed reader for the Kindle 2

It’s Saturday, and I just got a Kindle 2 this week. I’ve been thinking it’d be neat to be able to read feeds on the Kindle (since it has a built in Web Browser and internet connection), so I whipped up KRead. It’s a super-simple, mostly-text-only feed reader for the Kindle which just requires you to enter the URL of a single feed (or a website, it supports auto-discovery) and it’ll give you the content of the feed in a simply-formatted list so that you can read through it.

Check out the KRead project page for some more details or jump over to http://kread.beaulebens.com/ and try it out.

WP-o-Matic

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-o-matic/

WP-o-Matic

Pull the contents of a feed into a WordPress install and re-post the contents as real posts within your install. Easily abused, but might be good for internal “Planet” style sites.

FeedGrowler update: Custom icons

I’ve just updated the code for FeedGrowler so that it supports custom icons for each feed that you are monitoring. All you need to do is include the full path to an icon/image file as the second argument when you call feedgrowler.php (or in your crontab).

Custom icons for a WordPress feed, and a Twitter search.

This version also supports Atom feeds (in addition to previous RSS 2.0 support).

Check out the latest FeedGrowler.

FeedGrowler – get Growl notifications from your feeds

On a whim, I whipped up this quick project today. Basically it just gives you a Growl notification when a feed you’re monitoring gets a new post (or technically, when the most recent post in the feed changes content).

Check out FeedGrowler’s project page »

2 New Projects

I forgot to mention that I have 2 relatively new projects launched in the Projects section of this site:

TwitterProxy: Which allows you to do some cool filtering on your Twitter status feed (and then use it for whatever you want), and
Gravatar Shortcode: A quick WordPress plugin that gives you a shortcode that you can use to inject a Gravatar into your Pages or Posts.

Check them out and let me know what you think.