November 19, 2008

Before the big site update in September, I used to show links to the last few posts by a favorite local arts site, Shotgun Review, on the homepage. As I worked on the site rewrite, I thought about taking this simple idea and making it bigger. Instead of a small list from one site, what if there was a big list pulling from lots of sites? Since then I have been terribly distracted with various administrative and "back-end" tasks while the idea sat on the shelf. Well, I had a few hours the other night so I decided to dust it off and throw something together.

The result is what I am calling Pulse (not sure if that name will stick, but it's the first thing I thought of). I grabbed the RSS feeds from a handful of sites I check in on from time to time and created a system to pull them all together and spit out the 20 most recently updated items. This was a very quick effort and I may have to fine-tune some things, but it does the job of giving you a snapshot of what's going on in different corners of the city right now. There is no archive and the list changes as often as the source sites post new items. In the future I might break the list out into separate views by category (reviews, interviews, galleries, general, etc.) or similar. I could use the same idea to pull in Twitter feeds or Flickr photos as well, but one step at time.

If you have suggestions of other sites to include, please use the contact form to send me note. Enjoy!

Posted by Lucas at 9:30pm