It’s nine years since I registered the domain dave.org.uk and set up a web site there. And I’ve never really known what to do with it. Since I started blogging, it’s seemed even less useful. The blog front page was where all the interesting stuff happened. The main page just contained links to a few bad jokes and a couple of useful sub-sites. For years I just tinkered with the design a bit, but I was never really happy with it. Sometime early in 2005 I rewrote it so that it took a lot of its content from various RSS feeds that I published. But the code to do that was a really nasty hack which I’ve wanted to rewrite since the day I first wrote it.
A few weeks ago, I wrote Perlanet which is a simple program for aggregating web feeds and republishing the results. As I had some spare time yesterday, I rewrote the dave.org.uk front page using Perlanet to do most of the heavy lifting. It now contains the full text of the most recent entries from my various blogs, together with examples of my latest flickr uploads and list of recent twitters and delicious links. It’ll be simple to add other feeds to the mix in the future.
I realise that this isn’t exactly new. People have had sites like this for years. But I’m happy at how quickly I managed to build this and happier that it shows that Perlanet is as flexible as I wanted it to me. I’m also pretty happy with the way that it looks (although that is, I suspect, more to do with the Boilerplate CSS framework than my design skills).
I’ve also started to publish a number of Atom feeds. As you’ll see from the top right of the new page, there is one feed containing the blog entries, one containing the shorter stuff, one for photos (that’s just the original flickr feed but it might be expanded in the future) and one that contains everything (that’s the planet davorg feed). That allows readers a bit more flexibility over what content they subscribe to.
Oh, and I’ve also taken the opportunity to remove the links to all the old jokes. The pages are still there if you know where to look, but Google Analytics tells me that they won’t be missed.