An rssCloud Progress Report – Week One

Ok, so it isn’t really week one for Dave, he’s had this cloud element built into the spec since 2001. In fact, if you read that post, you could swear that it was written just a few days ago.

The concept has literally been rebooted, not rewritten.

It is, however, the first week for me. Even after I read the several pages he posted about the rssCloud effort back in July, I never had time to play with it until now. It has been a quick, painless, and relatively simple experience ever since.

Heck, it’s built on good tech, it should be.

The first step was to practice. I setup a basic server that I wanted to have notified when things were updated, then a basic client to subscribe to Dave’s cloud server. After running into firewall troubles, something else clarified in 2001, I realized that Amazon’s AWS was in order and setup my first real Linux instance over there. Another easy process, sweet!

Next, I setup a little Twitter client that posts to Twitter through the REST API, then backs the tweet up to an RSS feed on my server and notifies the cloud that it has been changed. The cloud in turn notifies me back, and then the main page at mystatuscloud.com is updated with the feed.

Seriously, good tech = fun stuff.

Then on Wednesday, the Google Reader team announced a new Send To feature that allows you to share items to other services via notification URL. As an extra option, they provide a spot for your own URL with parameters for url, title, source, and short-url. It didn’t take much to turn that into a service that tweeted the shared item to Twitter, saved a copy on the server, updated the RSS feed and notified, notified, etc.

Also, if you combine the ability to share notes via the same service with the script that Dave Winer wrote to push all your Twitter contacts into an OPML file, Google Reader is almost a full fledged Twitter client – already. The only side note is that Reader does not yet pass a title for notes, so the tweets show up mostly blank. According to @googlereader, they’ll be fixing that shortly.

Finally, tonight I implemented the cloud element into this blog’s RSS feed and setup another script to ping Dave’s rsscloud server when it’s updated.

So, now that I’m running out of my own stuff to add cloud elements too, I’m going to start working on the next phase. Some kind of multi-user thing is probably in order. We’ll see… on to week 2.