I actually got the background stuff for fubnub'ing feeds working today!
What that means is that I can now wrap my twitter feeds and rss feeds up into single posts and publish those posts to a blog or email via a twitter post.
Say what?
OK - it's a lot harder to explain than it is to actually use...and that's probably going to be my next challenge, putting together some screen shots, demos, and examples to make it easy to understand (and use) the whole idea.
But since I don't have those together yet, let's see if I can break it down in bullet form for you.
First the orig. problem that prompted me to build this:
1. I want to use Twitter to send quick updates about the things I'm working on - basically as a checked off to-do list. This way no matter where I am or what I'm doing, I can use Twitter to keep my list updated (since you can Tweet from via SMS, email, web, etc it's a nice way to piggyback off their services).
2. Eventually I want to take those one-off Twitter postings and roll them up into one larger list...a "this is what I did today" kind of thing.
3. Then I want that to be published on demand to my blog or sent to me via email as a single post/email.
OK - so that was the initial idea. Of course it expanded almost immediately into a number of 'cool' things I could/should probably do if I'm going to build a system that solves my above problem...all of which I'll share more details on later...for now though, let's talk about how the system actually helps me achieve my orig. goal:
1. I created a template that each of my twitter posts will get applied to when I publish. (eventually you'll be able to pick templates from the fubnub.com web site as well as create your own - but right now I just manually entered a few into the database).
2. I set up the delivery options I wanted for when I publish (ie. I associated my twitter username to one of the templates, said that I wanted the data delivered via email when I publish, and provided the email address I wanted it sent to.) (again I did this by manually entering the information into the database, but real users will do this via the fubnub.com web site).
3. I follow fubnub via twitter (and since fubnub is a twitter bot, it should then auto-follow me as well). You follow fubnub by tweeting this from your Twitter account:
follow fubnub
4. Now all I have to do is Tweet away and when I'm ready to 'publish', I just send a direct tweet to fubnub that looks something like this:
d fubnub #pt I'm publishing with fubnub!
This command tells fubnub that it should grab my latest tweets (from my Twitter timeline), apply the template I choose to that data, and then send it via email to the address I specified.
The subject of the email will be everything after the #pt in my tweet...so in this case "I'm publishing with fubnub!".
Pretty cool eh? But there's already a little more you can do (and lots more in the works).
1. If I chose to publish to my blog instead, the stuff after the #pt would be used as my post title. (currently you can publish via xmlrpc to wordpress and other metaweblog supported xmlrpc clients)
2. If I want to wrap up a series of RSS feeds into one post, I can go through the set up process like I mentioned above and the only thing that needs to change (besides the template because we will be using different fields) is the #pt command to something like this:
d fubnub #pr I'm publishing with fubnub!
3. fubnub also keeps track of the latest Tweet and/or RSS link that was included when you published, so that the next time you say to publish, it will not repeat items. (there are a few gotchas in the system right now because of limitations on what you can get out of Twitter timelines and RSS feeds, but the basic idea is true that it will not repeat data that it has already published.)
Of course all of this will hopefully be broken down with images and examples on the actual fubnub.com site (just as soon as I get time to do that).
I'll probably also build in support so that you can publish via tools at the fubnub site or by sending a publish command via email directly to fubnub (for those that don't want to mess with Twitter).
I'm also going to be working on adding in support for other feed related sources like Tumblr and audioscribbler (last.fm stuff).
For now though, the back end is up and running. So I'll be moving on to the front end (the fubnub.com web site)...once I get enough of that together, I can actually try and get a few other people out there trying/using it...and then we'll see where it takes us!
