Testing “Activity Stream” Plugin

Dot-com 2.0 (a bubble I think will eventually burst) has brought with it a slew of websites focusing on organizing, categorizing, and rating information. There’s del.icio.us for categorizing bookmarks, digg for rating news, stumbleupon for rating websites, tadalist for organizing todo lists, and an endless list more. What was keeping me from using these sites regularly was the need to visit each to keep track of my own activity. I decided over the weekend to solve that problem by creating a WordPress plugin to bring them all to my blog. I’m tentatively calling it “Activity Stream”, and you can see the initial version in my sidebar.

Activity Stream occasionally polls external sites with APIs or RSS feeds for updates, and stores them in a local database for fast retrieval. It can then display a stream of activity as a sidebar list, or as a full page. The display is very rough, and I haven’t written PHP4 OO code in quite a while so the code is very rough, but it’s generally working. It will only poll services you tell it to and provide your username for, and it will poll no more often than once in 30 minutes to respect the various TOS that request this. It hooks into WordPress’s initialization function to see if it needs to do an update at start, so no cron job required. If I do it right, then dropping in a new copy of the plugin could add new services without having to do any type of upgrade step.

I’d like to make the full-page display look more like a Facebook mini-feed, with grouping by date headers. I’ll also need to throw in a bunch more services; right now it only checks Digg, Stumbleupon and del.icio.us for updates. It also starts up less than gracefully for a new user; the stream isn’t in the order you actually performed actions since, unfortunately, many of these sites don’t record the actual time of your actions.