Solutions: Fixing things is harder than it looks

I'm a sucker for the latest and greatest website or service. There are hundreds of sites on the Internet where you can share your favorite music, photos, or pointless musings. While it's great to have so many sites to choose from it can be a pain for casual followers who are more accustomed to getting everything in one spot. I recently commented that my goal for the next few weeks was to unify my many, disparate feeds into one easy to follow stream of information.

So why would I want to do that? For starters any capacity for anonymity the Internet possessed is long gone. These days there are sites that specialize in archiving web pages, message boards, and even a record or every domain name you've ever owned. To make matters worse services like YouTube and facebook have long toyed with the concept of content ownership and leave serious doubt about how easily one's information could be removed. Simply put you can post few things these days which are ultimately tied back to your real identity.

The second, less paranoid, reason for content unification is because of the sheer amount of data there is to wade through. In a given month I update information or content on five or six different sites. If you weren't tied into all of those sites chance are you missed something. I may upload photos to Flickr, publish a story here about my vacation while at the same time commenting on the day-to-day experiences on facebook or twitter. In order to get the entire story you'd need to monitor all of those channels.

You could subscribe to half a dozen RSS feeds or you could consolidate the feeds into a single feed and rebroadcast it. In some circles this is called Lifecasting but to me that term is too specific. The point is not simply to broadcast one's life events across the web, but instead to pick À la carte the services you'd like to use and to bring them together into the total experience.

In my case the solution was a service called friendfeed. The site takes the various RSS feeds from your social media sites and combines them. I was able to pull feeds from YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr and this site all into a single feed. I was also able to automatically sync posts between Tumblr and Twitter automatically via a new feature the site implemented. I topped the entire system off by importing the friendfeed information as standard RSS into facebook which has become the central hub of my information.

Truthfully the system sounds much more complicated that it is. To set up the entire process all I had to do was collect the various RSS links from my public pages and paste them into friendfeed. In many cases friendfeed already has a custom import setup so that content is added to the new feed in a meaningful way.

After much strife the new InfoMountain.Org is online! The new site is powered by the latest incarnation of the popular content management package Joomla. The migration from version 1.x to 1.5 was a major one but included some major functionality changes. Over the next few weeks I'll continue adding more modules and features to the site. One item I'm still on the fence over is the ability to post comments. In the old days this was the only way to leave feedback, however these days the popularity of micro blogs, trackbacks, etc have made it incredibly easy for folks to respond to my articles via their site.

Speaking of micro blogs I've added a new service to the lineup called friendfeed (ff). Friendfeed collects your various rss feeds and social site activities into one "lifestream". The advantage is that you can subscribe to the friendfeed rss and will be notified whenever I post anything on any of my disparate sites. It's one of the more useful Web 2.0 sites out there but the remains one question: What if it's too much of information? Who knows. I say indulge your inner voyeur and subscribe today!

The feed: http://friendfeed.com/rax262?format=atom

The Joomla 1.5 migration has been going, albeit slowly. Over the past month I've attempted to port my current template but in the end this has turned out to be too difficult for a number of reasons. Today I move several of the frontpage articles over to the new platform and noticed that embedding Flash videos is broken or not working. So I'm staying put for the time being

Yes, this means that comments are still broken. However, I've made a few changes to the tumble log and twitter accounts. As I mentioned earlier I'm looking for a way to integration all of the social media elements into a more complete package. I have have the tumble log located at http://tumblr.infomountain.org. Tumblr is also now attached to the twitter account and will, allegedly, push content between the two. Check it out, and if you want to post comments just send me a tweet or tumble.

I'm kind of late to the party but I've finally started playing around with Joomla 1.5. I tried to do a site conversion a few weeks ago and managed to break nearly everything on this site. Thankfully the new, completely rewritten Joomla is cleaner and so packed full of features and supported components that I can easily recreate this site from scratch.

The only problem now? Transferring most of my content to the new site and tweaking a brand new template. So why the sudden kick-in-the-pants drive to convert? Well I'm working on a site project for someone else and I wanted to start with the latest and greatest version of the Joomla CMS.

Oddly enough I've noticed that the economy has affected even the free software sector of the net. A few years back you'd have to pay between $15-$50 for a site template. These days they are cheaper or as cheap as free. Awesome! Makes my job much easier.