Driving to the office this morning, I happened to be brainstorming a few ideas for another project to work on (in addition to the other half dozen I haven’t finished yet). One of the items I kicked around over the weekend was to follow up my new Blog Calendar widget with a version for my Twitter feed. I thought it would be neat to go back and see my tweets from a particular day to see what was going on and how much of it I actually remembered doing. 🙂
Going down that rabbit hole sort of reminded me of something I had did earlier in the year with creating my Maui Twitter page. I created that page before our most recent trip to Maui in order to record different activities and locations we were visiting using Twitter as a log, and then displaying those entries on my Maui site for others to view. After the trip, I used the same logs to create the Trip Itinerary pages, which included the time and message from each tweet, as well as comments I wrote up for each activity when I was putting the pages together.
…Back to the Point
So I started thinking about doing something similar when I’m not on vacation, where I could gather up all my tweets for a given day and put it into a blog post or something with comments if I wanted to elaborate on something in particular. That itself doesn’t seem that hard since I’ve already played around with the Twitter API for the page mentioned above and for work on kris.nelson.
From there, the idea just started to snowball. Instead of just tweets from a given day, I starting thinking I could import a few photos that I might have uploaded to Flickr that day (probably tying them back to the date taken instead). I’ve used the Flickr API quite a bit, too, so that seems easy.
But wait, there’s more. 🙂
I started thinking about what else I do online all day and where I can pull that into this new little idea. I’m on Facebook, and even though I haven’t looked at the API for that yet, that would be fun to pull in certain things from there. I could bring in feeds and posts that I read from other RSS feeds using Google Reader (either through it’s API or just through the individual feeds themselves). I could probably use something like del.icio.us to pull in other pages that I might have read and wanted to include, too. All that seems like a good start, don’t you think?
The Plan
This could just be an old fashioned mash-up and not really have to be something that I publish everyday, but for now, I’m kind of feeling like it would be better off if it started as blog posts, at least to start. Thinking through it initially, I will probably create a standalone WinForm app in C# that I use to go out and gather all the feeds and data for a given date. Using a few things behind the scenes (thinking XML and XSL/T), I could create a boilerplate blog post with a merged set of all these various items listed out in chronological order and ready for me to fill in the gaps.
Heck, I’m even thinking of using the Blogger API to post a draft version of all of this mashed-up goodness so I can just run this little guy and go right to Blogger to review, add/edit and publish.
It’s starting to look like this could keep me busy for awhile, what do you think?
