Because my online ego is so bloated that it needs its own domain name

March 24, 2009 11:20 PM

I recently was able to get [my name].com, which I'm super happy about. When I was thinking about what I should put up there, I thought a great idea would be to aggregate / mashup all my various social networks into one digestible page. How can I accomplish this?

What I'm sort of picturing is a landing page that has my lastest tweets, my flickr feed, a feed to a blog i contribute to, a link to my facebook, and a few other things on it.

Ideally, it would have the look and feel of what perspctv.com does (example of a mashup here), except I wouldn't necessarily need it to be live-updating.

I imagine working with Yahoo Pipes would be a start, but is there a way to have multiple pipe feeds on one page, like what perspctv does? Or would it be smarter to work with some kind of blog/CMS? Or is there some site that already does this that I can just plug information to (best answer!)? Or is this not really possible without extensive web programming skillz (worst answer D:)?

I guess I would understand if something like this isn't completely feasible, but I really hope there is a way.

posted by carpyful to technology (9 comments total)

Previously. (more or less)
posted by niles at 11:22 PM on March 24 [1 favorite has favorites]

Uhm, that was kind of awesome.

Definitely the direction I'm looking towards, but I'd like to see all the options available, so please throw out any other suggestions you might have!
posted by carpyful at 11:26 PM on March 24

I've been playing with this same concept... lifestream.fm comes pretty close if you just want to embed their badge somewhere.

I tried to do a yahoo pipes thing to get everything in one single RSS feed which I then displayed using an RSS widget-type thing, but I'm not yahoo pipes savvy enough to make it show up the way I wanted.

Do you want everything in a single stream or do you want separate areas on the page for each service?

Another useful tool is retaggr which lets you list all the sites you're on in a compact little "how to find me" badge. I've got one on my About Me page for work.
posted by polexa at 2:35 AM on March 25

SweetCron does exactly what you want, plus it's free, open source and in public beta. You'd need to host it though.
posted by Happy Dave at 3:33 AM on March 25 [2 favorites has favorites]

I've been doing this for about a year now. I use nucleus cms with the RSS / feed plugin. I've tried a bunch of CMSs over the years (drupal, joomla, etc, etc) and have always found nucleus to come up on top for this purpose (requires php and mysql on your webhosts server).

It takes a good understanding of FTP and editing various CSS (style pages) and skins / template variables to get what you're looking for, but like some of the others have suggested, it's just a simple matter of taking RSS feeds from all the social sites you use and embedding them in a way that you think reflects your visual style for others to see. Also a basic to intermediate understanding of HTML will be indispensable, if you're looking to truly customize your presentation within your own domain.
posted by eli_d at 3:57 AM on March 25

Sort of a side note: one thing to be aware of with Sweetcron is discussed here:

Another important note about Sweetcron is that it really is a blogging engine, not just a feed parser. What this means is that when it pulls in a new entry (say, a new Twitter Tweet) it makes an entry for that in the Database and that content now officially lives on your site. If you delete that Tweet on Twitter later on, or in any way change the content of the feed, that won't automatically change it on your site like it might if you were using a feed parser.

That might be totally obvious, but I didn't realize it at first when I was installing Sweetcron.
posted by transporter accident amy at 4:14 AM on March 25

A template for this page is available for download [ZIP] from CSS-Tricks.
posted by aheckler at 4:55 AM on March 25

This probably isn't what you're looking for, but chi.mp does basically what you're asking. Right now you don't have a lot of control over the look of your site, but you can change your name records so that yourname.com is the chi.mp site. And it's free.
posted by justgary at 2:52 PM on March 25

It looks like SweetCron is my best option, thanks for everyone's help! I'm going to play around with it this weekend. I'm very excited!
posted by carpyful at 11:00 PM on March 25