Out and About was the primary driver that convinced me to actually complete this website. I’ve begun a number of websites in the past, but haven’t completed them. I suppose I didn’t have a good reason for any of them, other than using them as a personal platform. Also I’m enough of a geek that I’ve been more interested in proving to myself that I could build X. So when I completed X, I would drop the website altogether. With this website, I’ve got a good reason to keep on trucking, and that reason is Out and About.

As I describe in more detail here, I wanted to collect as many bits of my fractured online identity as possible under one roof. I’ve begun with several of the simpler services to work with (Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, Digg, and Amazon).

These services are “simpler” largely because they provide RSS feeds of user data vs. digging into the guts of a service’s API. So it’s fairly easy to fetch that data and insert it into my existing database. I’m then able to output that data (in any way I choose) through my CMS. When I say “fairly easy,” I mean that conceptually it’s not rocket science. You request some data, process it a bit, dump it into the database, request it from the database, process it some more, and spit it out on the page.

I’m not programmer or developer, but I do know enough to be dangerous. So making this all happen actually took me more than a week of full-time work. Might have been shorter but I fussed with the visual design quite a bit trying to find the right look.

If you’re interested, I used SimplePie, a lot of PHP, Wordpress, and a server cron job. The part that took the longest was setting up the cron job. I spent an entire day trying to set it up on my local MAMP server so I could test it locally. Don’t try this at home. Managed to truly screw up my machine and spent another day of research and trial-and-error to fix it.

One drawback to my solution is that it depends on RSS feeds. Typically social network services deliver “most-recent” RSS feeds, which seem to be around 15 to 30 items into the past. So I don’t actually have all of me collected yet. I’m working on a one-off way to grab all the older data and then use the most-recent feeds going forward.

I’ve also discovered a date discrepancy with at least one of the services—YouTube. The data attached to each feed item is the date the video was uploaded to YouTube, rather than what I expected, which is the date I favorited it on YouTube. So I can tell that I’m going to need a two-date system in the future to accommodate these kinds of discrepancies. Since my solution updates once an hour, I can assume that the “fetch” date is the date I performed the action on the service. The item feed date may differ, in which case, for the sake of simplicity, I’ll call that the origin date.

My ultimate goal is to visualize the collected data from my online activities in an interesting way. I’ve got some thoughts about how to cross-reference it against real-world activities, and I think that might be interesting both visually and personal-historically. More soon.