The circle is round

Last week I proudly introduced a new website Centipiet, that gathers all my social media expressions neatly into one stream. Each media has its own color, so depending how busy I make myself appear, my “life stream” becomes a cacophony of colors. After a bit more tweaking I think I have managed to set it all up correctly now.

For the people interested in the underlying technology, here follows a short explanation.
The site is made with a child theme I made for the default WordPress 3.0 theme Twenty Ten.

I took the RSS Feed of each of the social media I wanted to import into the stream. Most sites are set up that you can easily grab this feed, however for others it is more difficult and for some it even looks impossible at first sight, but after a bit of searching, I managed to get the right feed for all sites.

The feeds of Facebook and Twitter needed some filtering, because each entry is prefixed with your name. That is where Yahoo! Pipes comes in. At first sight Yahoo! Pipes looks quite intimidating, but fortunately there are plenty of samples and tutorials available, so eventually I managed to figure it out.

Before I had this live stream set up on Centipiet.com I automatically pulled my tweets, foursquare check ins and other status updates into Facebook. If I would continue to do so, then my Facebook feed would become very cluttered, so instead I cancelled all those. I wanted to push my Centipiet RSS Feed to Facebook instead.

However that posed one problem as I already was pulling Facebook into Centipiet; that would lead to an infinite loop. Again Yahoo! Pipes brought the solution by taking the Centipiet RSS Feed and filtering out all messages from the Facebook category.

Notes on Facebook turned out to be very unreliable, so I switched to RSS Graffiti, a Facebook app, and now it all works perfect!

Currently Centipiet.com gathers updates from eight different sites and pushes them all nicely to Facebook. I am still waiting for YouTube as they only have an RSS Feed for your favorites, but not for your likes. As soon as a feed for those becomes available I will add it too.