the way Erik Benson Buster McLeod has built his site – as an aggregator of his contributions to and interaction with sites from all over the web. Practically everything I’d care to write about has a place on the web already: my site seems almost redundant. Last.fm is a good example: it contains so much metadata and social connectivity related to my own music consumption as to make a stand-alone musicblog seem weedy by comparison.
However, I like the idea of archiving my webstuff: while hosting it elsewhere lessens maintenance hassle and adds value in other ways, it involves giving up a degree of control that I’m not altogether happy with. I’ve been on the net for long enough to have plenty of experience with seemingly robust and professional outfits losing or sequestering content. So I’d really like my own copy of whatever I post around the web.
I’m not as smart as Buster, though, and have little idea how to set up my own site to work the same way (though I’ve looked at a few feedreaders to see if they would work.) I did think I trusted 43T enough to do the job – I’ve been hoping that I could just set up a redirect from my URL to 43People’s built-in feed aggregator instead. Much of my webstuff now shows up in my 43 feed anyway.
But my usual bugbears about a hosted service have arisen. I don’t have enough control over what appears in the aggregated feed, or how it’s presented — and now 43T has started to ignore or overlook updates to some feeds, in particular my linklog. This is pretty irritating, since I don’t know why and have no way of finding out or fixing the problem (short of hassling the Robots, and I suspect they have better things to do.)
So I think it’s back to the drawing board. Anyone want to give me any tips on how I can archive the contents of RSS feeds on my webspace, preferably using off-the-shelf software?
