Build a Personal Social Aggregator with Pubwich

Productivity Sauce

Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Flickr -- with new social services popping up almost every day, how do you make all your social activities easily accessible to your friends and followers?

Enter Pubwich, a simple PHP script that aggregates data from several popular social services into a single HTML page. To run Publish on your server, you need the Apache server, PHP 5 with the SimpleXML and cURL extensions, and the crontab tool. To install Pubwich, download the latest version of the software, unpack the downloaded archive, and move the resulting folder to the document root of your server. Rename the cfg/config.sample.php file to cfg/config.php and open t for editing. Specify the parameters in the Localization and General site information sections. Next, you have to configure the settings for the services you want to use with Pubwich. To do this, you need to understand the structure of the config.php file. Each supported service is stored as an array containing the required settings. For example the Flickr array is as follows:

array( 'Flickr', 'photos', array(

    'key' => 'FLICKR_KEY_HERE',

    'userid' => 'FLICKER_USERID_HERE',

    'username' => 'FLICKR_USERNAME_HERE',

    'total' => 12,

    'title' => 'Flickr',

    'description' => 'latest photos',

    'row' => 4,
    )
),

Each service array is rendered as a box on Pubwich's main page. To configure access to Flickr, you replace placeholders with the actual values. If you want to remove a specific service from your Pubwich page, simply delete the appropriate array from the config.php file. All service arrays are grouped in arrays that represent columns on Pubwich's main page. So if you want the Flickr box to appear in a different column, move it from one column array to another.
In addition to the third-party social services, Pubwich can handle RSS feeds, so you can use it to publish feeds from your favorite Web sites. To add an RSS feed to Pubwich, you have to add an array containing the RSS feed's settings. Here is what the array that displays the latest five headlines from the Productivity Sauce RSS feed looks like:

array( 'RSS', 'Productivity Sauce', array(
    'url' => 'http://www.linux-magazine.com/rss/feed/productivity_sauce',
    'link' => 'http://www.linux-magazine.com/productivitysauce',
    'total' => 5,
    'title' => 'Productivity',
    'description' => 'Dmitri's open source blend of productive computing'
    )
),

You can also tweak the default theme, and the supplied README file explains how to do that.

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