One of my current side projects / tinkerings is the creation of a site which aggregates a bunch of my online feeds – an aggregated “identity dashboard”.
Jean-Francois made me think about using WordPress to do this. I love WordPress. It’s so ridiculously simple to install… provided you have a PHP + MySQL host, you just unzip, provide the DB login information in the config file, and then it initialises itself and has a nice administration dashboard. I played around with adding some feeds in widgets on the sidebar, and it kind of works. I can edit my own pages and I don’t have to use it as a blog.
Talking to Rob on Friday led me to experiment with Planet. Planet is built in Python, and generates static HTML pages. It is exclusively built for aggregating feeds together, and it works fine, but I have to go hack around in config files, setup a cron job, and so on.
Something I’d never heard about until today is MoonMoon. This is a PHP-based web solution (like WordPress) but it’s a simple feed aggregator rather than a CMS (i.e. similar to Planet). It doesn’t need a database. It’s at a fairly early stage of development, but if you pull down the latest code from Subversion you’ll find that it does have a nice administration page that enables new feeds to be added very quickly without the need to go near any configuration files.
Still at the tinkering / experimentation stage, but this has been an interesting exercise so far.
