Splicing gone wild
The recent Flickr announcement of combined photo/blog feeds at Feedburner brings up a feature I've been meaning to build for ages. For no other reason than to see if it could be done, I've been looking into a way to create a combined feed for this site, featuring two entries above the typical archive of the last x weblog entries. The first entry would be the photo of the day, taken from my tenyearsofmylife.com site. The second was going to be an extra special feed-only post that was basically "my current favorite word" or "thought of the day" that I'm too lazy to make a full entry on this site or a sidebar feature.
I never got around to doing it because the ten years site is on another server and the feed would have to be sucked in somehow, then two onsite feeds would need to be combined. It seems like a perfect fit for someone like Feedburner though, since they're pulling in all sorts of stuff.
There's an obvious endpoint I could see quickly moving my feed to. I've often joked that among all my websites, this blog is sort of my own personal "temple of ego," since it's fairly self-indulgent and I pretty much link to everything I'm posting somewhere else, from here. I could see basically creating an "ego feed" that is the ultimate representation of me. Here's what I would put in my ultimate combined feed:
- last x posts from this site
- most recent photo from my Ten Years site
- feed of my recent posts to MetaFilter, MetaTalk, and Ask MetaFilter
- x most recent Flickr photos
- last x bookmarks posted to my del.icio.us space
- my upcoming events, on the days they happen I suppose
- last x posts I've made to the Creative Commons weblog
- my last x posts to PVRblog
- link to the last feature I wrote
- Any new story I write at Ticketstubs
- Any significant comments I make on any other blog, if I could optionally click something to "send to my feed" as I post it.
Ideally, all the last x posts/photos from other sites would be intermixed into the feed, as they happen. So the feed wouldn't be always in the same order, but ordered by posting date, and may include content from any website or service I'm posting to.
Basically, it'd be the cult of me, all in a single feed, and you wouldn't have to scour a dozen sites looking for my contributions if you really wanted to follow my writing. I suspect we're not a long way off from Feedburner allowing you to do something like that.