Valhalla Island

Thanks to Caius I thought it’d be a great idea to create a single page that amalgamates everything I do online - web apps, blogging, linking, contact info, blah, blah, blah. I call it All My Shit and I think it’s pretty cool. I’m an organised person so this kind of thing makes me happy.

I took it a step further than Caius and syndicated a lot of the content. It’s almost like an online feed reader dedicated to my stuff.

Thanks to developer APIs and then generous developers that create easy to use class wrappers for the APIs it was a piece of cake. I used easy scrobbler, phpFlickr, this Twitter library (with some cURL modifications so it’d run on Dreamhost) and SimplePie for the other RSS parsing. It also uses the hCard Microformat for marking up the contact information. This was my first time using Microformats and the experience was pleasant enough. I chose semantic markup over the div soup the MF website recommends.

As this is just a little something for my enjoyment I thought it’d be a great idea to use XHTML 1.1 and serve it as it was made to be served, with XML. This means that if the document’s not well formed it won’t render at all, which isn’t a problem because it is well formed. Although, due to Internet Explorer 6’s lack of support for XML it won’t render the page at all, it’s time you got Firefox anyway.

Mark Pilgrim said it was hard when the Habari discussion on what to serve was happening. He was right and I’ve just barely scratched the surface. More problems arose from external data and it’s character encoding than from anything else. If I was in full control of the data produced it wouldn’t have been quite as difficult.

Pageflakes has been doing something similar, although remotely hosted, for a while now. I think there’ll always be markets for the same product both remotely and locally hosted. It’s why Gallery 2 and Flickr can happily live side by side. Some friends have suggested I bundle the whole thing up, give it a cool name and a back end so people can create similar amalgamations of their online activity without touching code. I think it’s a good idea.