One of my many obsessions is with activity streams — collecting the little bits of information we leave all over the web and organizing it into something a bit more useful. I used to use Sweetcron for that on this website but a) Sweetcron has largely been abandoned and efforts to fork and update it have largely failed, and b) I really wanted something that would work within a WordPress install, especially with the new multi-site capability built-in to WordPress.
The solution is the FeedWordPress plugin. Essentially, FeedWordPress is just an RSS/Atom aggregator. You give it RSS/Atom feed URLs and then set up a cron job to call the update function. After that, it goes through on a regular basis reading the feeds and adding new entries to WordPress as posts.
You can see the result on my lifestream subsite. I’ve got FeedWordPress checking about 40 different RSS feeds and then adding each new item as a separate post. FeedWordPress makes it trivial to do things like automatically tag posts, so I can easily drill down and look at just my main World of Warcraft character’s stream.
FeedWordPress does pretty much everything I wanted a lifestream app to do.
