Personal Zeitgeist
I’ve finally started work on my zeitgeist page. My personal projects have been on the back-burner, as I’ve (obviously) had other things to think about!
Personal Zeitgeist is very easy to get up and running, although I have been making a lot of tweaks – mostly to satisfy my own coding preferences; for example: renaming the *.inc files to *.inc.php – so that nobody else can view the source-code. (That’s been one of my long-term gripes with, the otherwise brilliant, SimplePie).
I’ll most likely do a lot more customisation to the zeitgeist template/theme before I set it as my default web-page.
Here are a few of the things I want it to do:
- Act as my OpenID delegate (I haven’t yet decided who to use as my default OpenID provider – most likely be WordPress.com)
- Display a set of links to all my external web-profiles (i.e. flickr, last.fm, etc.) – along with corresponding favicons, XFN and OPML. (Actually it’s probably easier to store them as OPML in the first place.)
- I’m also considering adding some tag cloud functionality – just to quench my thirst for tagging.
- Develop a few functions; specifically an email obfuscator (most likely lift the code from wp-includes)
Who knows when I’ll be able to do all this… especially when my other commitments are quite demanding! 
Neat. I saw your earlier post, so I set up a Zeitgeist the other day (http://www.bogdind.com/about). I’m not as advanced as you, so mine won’t do all the fancy lad things you’re going to make yours do. I do think I’m running into a bit of an error. Bug? Maybe not. It won’t display my shared or starred articles from Google Reader. I said to heck with it and just removed.
On my day off, I’m going to hack at the theme, and probably unstandardize it.
Ben Taylor
February 15, 2008 at 6:21 am
Hey Ben, It’s so cool that you’ve got a Zeitgeist set-up too!
I had problems with the Google Reader feeds, like you I had to remove it.
The HTML isn’t standardised anyway; I wouldn’t worry about messing anything up.
I found a few other little bugs in there, I’ll share the code with you once I’ve hacked around a bit more… who knows we could open-source it on Google Code?!
Lee Kelleher
February 15, 2008 at 9:32 am
Yes! I think it’s pretty neat. The Zeitgeist is similar to a, “social networking,” idea I hatched almost three years ago (A profile page that lists the basics about you, and imports your blog, pics, and anything else via RSS). Give this thing the ability to add friends/send messages, and it would be close to my original vision.
I plan on making several themes for this thing. I think it’s worth the time. I’ll probably start doing that once I start work on those Blogger themes I need to clean up. Hey, now I know what I can do this weekend.
Also, this thing needs digg integration!
Ben Taylor
February 15, 2008 at 6:28 pm
Ben, you should keep an eye on the DiSo Project. http://code.google.com/p/diso/
It uses WordPress as the basis of a decentralised distributed social network – wow, try saying that with a mouthful of Pez!
Lee Kelleher
February 16, 2008 at 12:40 am
HA! God, I’m trying to remember the last time I ate Pez. It’s been years.
We should definitely poke this thing a few times and upload it to Google Code. Instead of joining MySpace to create a profile page, you can install this on your own domain. It updates itself!
I have the next two days off from work, so I’ll be cleaning up the theme and making a few new ones once I get out of class. Some of us didn’t have kids.
Ben Taylor
February 19, 2008 at 7:40 am
To talk briefly about the .inc thing, the very first day I sat down to write the first version of SimplePie, I chose to use .inc for three reasons.
1) SimplePie wasn’t originally intended to ever be a standalone product. It was supposed to be a simplified wrapper for MagpieRSS (e.g. Simple API for MagPie) so that I could more easily integrate RSS feeds into a larger project that I was working on. In the end, the larger project was crap so I never released it, and SimplePie turned out to be a runaway hit. Who knew?
2) The file is an include, and not something that people should have to edit or otherwise mess with.
3) .inc (in this context) is essentially PHP code that people can openly read even on the internet. At the time, it seemed like it would be a good idea for an open source project to have source that was… open. Now I realize it really doesn’t matter, but I can’t say I have any plans to change it.
So that’s why we use .inc instead of something else.
Ryan Parman
March 1, 2008 at 7:06 pm
Hi Ryan,
Firstly, thank you for taking the time to comment on this. I’ve used SimplePie on several projects, it’s served me well… so I’m quite a fan!
I do agree with the openness of the code… why shouldn’t anyone be able to view it?!
I guess my original reaction was to prevent outsiders from viewing any code on my web-server.
We will be using SimplePie for our new project Pez, which will use the .inc extension – makes upgrades “simpler”.
Keep up the great work!
Lee Kelleher
March 1, 2008 at 7:35 pm