Any recommendations?

1. Yes, you’re absolutely right. In fact, I alluded to it in the post (or maybe the last one). I just have a tendency to complicate my writing with too many options. So this time, I focused on just the home page option.

2. There IS a cron job plugin, but it runs fake cron jobs. I think it’s also hosting-dependent. But maybe I can do a advanced followup article in the future.

3. Ah, got it: a backup/failsafe. Well, I’m crossing my fingers that (a) Pipes will leave beta mode some day; and (b) that the caching issue of the fetch_rss() function can be overridden. This would eliminate the annoying problem of nothing showing in the River from time to time.

Right, right. Well, if I ever get my version completed, I might release it as open source, or maybe donationware. Depends on how much coding time I have to put in. Most of the past year has been spent in research and contemplation – no coding other than this series for the River. I’ll release as much as I can.

But excellent ideas. Thanks for the contemplation fodder.

1. index.php is a great choice, but incase a person wanted to place the river on a seperate page, the index would still be good for other purposes. Plus I’m just partial to creating page-templates and pushing WP’s envelope a bit.

2. This might be true, but I just spotted a cron job plugin. (Sorry not sure where)

3. It would still be the same niche, it’s just for backup purposes so the page won’t show “no rss items to display”
Yahoo Pipes could just be the primary aggregator. When it goes down use an autoblog plugin or something else that pulls from the same sources.

The email idea is essentially another variation of the above only for use when Yahoo Pipes goes on a coffee break. Either could be used instead of getting “no rss items to display” on the front page. When the pipe fails visitors still get content instead of clicking away never to return.

You can also change the code to display to the admin only, something like “Yahoo Pipes is down, backup in use.” instead of “no rss items to display”.

You are absolutely right, custom code is ideal for a production system. I am suggesting ideas for newbies, non-coders and people without money to outsource could use to make something right now. Plus, just by bringing positive input a lightbulb might go off that may help you or other visitors improve the idea in a direction not thought of before.

(1) Not sure why you’d do this. Index.php suffices for my purposes. Am I missing something? You can of course put the river of news pretty much anywhere on your site that you prefer.

(2) Cron services are not available on a lot of budget hosting accounts, so I didn’t start exploring this angle. But for a more advanced version, it’s a great consideration.

(3) Very cool, but if I’m following one niche, why would I partition its feed set into two or more groups? That defeats the purpose of a niche monitor if you’re only seeing some of the feeds you’re following at any given time.

I’m not sure I understand the email idea. For my purposes, I need a river that shows headlines, links and excerpts, so that I can quickly scan what people are writing in a niche. Later, I want to transform my river of news into a tool exactly like Techmeme/Megite, but for any niche I pick.

Maybe it’s Saturday and my brain’s not working, but it seems the email step is unnecessary. My dependency on Yahoo Pipes in this example is purely for prototype, and so that I can discuss the tool in this article. In a production system, I’d use cron jobs and replace Yahoo Pipes with custom Perl or PHP code.

How can I credit you when you’re anonymous?

How about adding this twist

1. Instead of using index.php create a template page “page-newsclone.php” dump the code in there.
2. Set up a cron job to check for new feeds and update “autopost” accordingly.

3. Instead of leaving the pipe dry when yahoo bonks out kick back out to another group feed. You could even have it on another file, pulling manually

ooh the lights done came on! Have all the feeds in the clone going to email. Then post by email and set up you template to only show title and link to the source. Booya! No blank pages.

If you code it up before I hack my way to a funcitoning version, I would kindly appreciate some source code love.