A Few Notes on the Sidebar

Right now I have links to a few social sites that I use on the sidebar. These sites include Twitter, delicious.com, Google Reader (selected articles that I thought were interesting enough to share), and last.fm (music I’ve been listening to recently). At some point I’ll get UVFood and Flickr in there, too.

I like the idea of presenting my activity on these sites in the sidebar. It gives you an idea of what I’m up to, and helps make this blog a hub for my activity. At first I used various WordPress plugins that were tailored to the particular sites. There were two problems with doing that. First, their formatting was all over the place. They used different heading tags, made assumptions about formatting, embedded their own formatting. They looked like a mess when taken together. The second problem was that they all loaded their info in real time, which meant it could take minutes to load a dot-dot-romkey page. No good at all.

So I started using the Feedcache plugin, which uses a cron job to read a list of feeds and store the results in a database, which WordPress can simply read from when it generates the page. Much faster.

Feedcache is partly written in Ruby, which was a bit of a pain. It’s the only reason I had to install Ruby on my server. I’m not thrilled about adding in the overhead of another programming language just to cache my RSS feeds.

Two small problems. First, Feedcache seems to go a bit notes on quoting if you try to use quotes in the titles of the feeds. I wanted to embed links to the sites in the feed titles, but the links got messed up when I saved the configuration. I’ll look into this more later, but for now, no links, which just seems wrong. Second, I’m still not thrilled with the formatting. Feedcache by default capitalizes everything, which is really not good. I’d also like to do more formatting that’s appropriate to the site: on Twitter, there’s no need to have my name first on every line. On last.fm, I’d like links to particular arists, songs and albums.

For now, though, I have more important things to do than fuss with the sidebar, so this is the way it will remain for the time being.