Accumulators come to MT
Byrne Reese: Aggregating all of these activities I participate in across the Internet should be as seamless and as easy as it was for me to create them in the first place. And until now, nothing has been made available that collects and publishes this data for your personal blog. But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Today, we released for Movable Type Open Source a plugin called Action Streams that allows users to input the various services they use
I disagree about the newness, after all Lifestreams and Accumulators have been around for a long time. There even is a WordPress plugin that does something similar.
I do, however, strongly agree with the notion that such approaches provide a greater level of control. It is DataPortability.org in action. Today. Without requiring Data Providers to change anything, unless they don’t currently provide a feed. Once that feed is available, Accumulators can take it from there, presenting, archiving, and mashing up the data at will.
Such approaches are not with some peril, however. Venus, mostly by virtue of being built upon the Universal Feed Parser, has a lot of code in place to compensate for bad feeds. The Action Stream plugin does a credible job, but it appears to have let an a escaping once too many times issue by. In addition, I wonder about XSS issues.
Update: Byrne has already fixed the escaping issue. That’s fast service! As to the remaining warning, it is consequence of the fact that some sources only provide feeds in formats that not only don’t require entry level date information, but even the Best Practices Profile for RSS 2.0 doesn’t contain a recommendation that such dates be provided.