Blog Once, Feed Anywhere

Related link: http://jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/feed/index.php

Back when I worked at a big L.A. recording studio, I fell into a strange pattern where I’d get off my 12-hour shift, drive home, and then read audio magazines before falling asleep. (I also got a number of parking tickets, because I often couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, running me afoul of the street sweepers.) I was immersed in music, but neglecting my own.

I thought about that “shoemaker’s children” irony recently when I realized that I was spending a lot of time crafting the O’Reilly Digital Audio site (and this blog), but very little updating my personal sites. What if I could automatically feed my O’Reilly blog into my home page?

Turns out it was easy and free. I just filled out a form at Feed to JavaScript (Feed2JS) and popped the resulting line of JavaScript into my site, Batmosphere.com. Feed2JS also has an interactive page where you can customize the look of the feed using CSS. The service is developed and hosted at Maricopa Community Colleges, although the PHP code that runs it is also available as open source, so you can host it yourself if desired.

As an example, here I’ll embed Derrick Story’s latest blog:

[UPDATED; SEE BELOW.]

I even tried pointing my blog at itself and nothing blew up, so I’m pretty confident in this approach. The Feed2JS site lists several alternative services, but I liked its ease of use so much I didn’t look any further.

UPDATE, 2006-08-19:The original developer of Feed2JS left a few months back, and service became spotty, breaking both the feed on my site and the example above. I've since switched to FeedDigest. Here's what it looks like with Derrick's blog feed: