One of the neatest things I’ve found lately is the proliferation of websites to manage aspects of your life publicly. Seeing as I’m not totally privacy paranoid, it’s a fun hobby. I recently discovered All Consuming which was created by Erik Benson. It’s a neat way to track books, music, and movies that you’re reading, listening to, and watching respectively.
Robot Co-op, the company that runs 43 Things, bought it up. This means that the two services will soon be intertwined. 43 Things is one of the sources on Tag Central but unfortunately All Consuming is not because they don’t supply RSS feed for their tags. Hopefully that will change.
Erik also does a very neat thing with his site. He collects all his data from many sites into a single place using Bloglines. It’s ultra-slick. I almost do this with Feedburner, collecting my Flickr and Del.icio.us data into the feed. However, at press time, they still don’t allow addition of arbitrary RSS feeds, which is really disappointing. I think I’ll start an aggregation a la Erik’s site sometime soon so I don’t feel pressed to publish all the time. I’ll keep you updated.
During a round of service adding last night, I figured out a way to differentiate between no results and an error. That’s good because now users will know when they’ll have to visit the source itself to see the results. The worst error offender by far is Technorati. Probably the majority of the tags will come up with an error message. You can then run their feed through the feed validator and witness for yourself the problem.
You’ll probably see some red question marks in a see of asian characters. Many, many people submit blog entries in a foreign language. Really, they are a large part of the problem. Probably what bugs me most is that these entries are in that foreign language, but tag them in English. How does that make any sense?? I’ll let that go, but that means the responsibility then lands squarely on the feed publisher’s head to ensure that when they publish a feed encoded with UTF-8, it is UTF-8. If they don’t, it will break many RSS parsers (including MagpieRSS, which I use). It makes me look incompetent even though it’s their mistake.
I may have to amend the error message to reflect this. Something along the lines of Sorry, a request or processing error occurred. Most likely the source has invalid characters in their feed. Please contact them if this bothers you.
I took a couple hours, learned PHP’s objects and redesigned Tag Central so that all the information for the sources could be stored in a big array object. Now it’s trivial for me to add a new source, so I can start adding all those sources that everyone submitted. I may started restricting the number of results per source to a smaller number (such as I have done with BlogMarks) to avoid unsightly white space and making the page utterly huge.
I made the formatting for describing new sources very easy, so I’ll be adding a new submission form for people to submit source information (so I don’t have to look it up myself).
I’m only a few steps short of using database to track all this data which will make managing the site even easier for me.
Peter Parkes reskinned Tag Central using PithHelmet and a custom CSS file. I think it looks simply Sensual as he put it.
I like it so much in fact that I’m going to ask if it would be possible to make it the default and perhaps (if he’s interested) come up with some more skins (which was my plan for my blog here, but I never got around to it). I think some great things are ahead!
Alexa, part of Amazon has linked Tag Central very prominently in a recent blog entry. That drew quite a few visits.
I vow that this weekend I will at least get the supporting pages up so the site isn’t quite as mysterious as it is now.
