Here’s another adaptation to WordPress that I can now add to the list: Business Listings Directory. We’ve got full detail on our Developing OTFA blog on how to get the same out of a fresh install of WordPress 2.5, plus ideas on extending the format into an Ad rotator etc. for a WPMU install. Suffice to say, we are very happy to announce that business.forargyll.com is in beta testing, and it is looking really very good!

You’ll see if you read this blog regularly that we have added a title to our third column, ‘Elaboration’. This is a feed from our development blog on the fyneside.com MU installation of WordPress. On this project we have used the Aggr plugin to display RSS feeds on the front page of the main blog of the MUWP (it works beautifully) and the Smart RSS plugin to aggregate the feeds on our feed engine prior to display.

It has been an interesting journey: we’ve had to hack around with the loop on the main blog to display the rss.fyneside feed, and adapt the aggr.php file to get rid of some of the formatting. The Smart RSS displays links to the original stories in a new window by default – we got rid of that too … didn’t want it. It will be interesting to see how all of this affects traffic and navigability, as well as the footprint of the rss blog on my server.

We’re presently uploading the pictures of our designs onto Flickr to broaden our exposure to the internet (they’re here). We’re also feeding the pictures onto our Facebook account (here) alongside the entries on this blog and other interesting bits and pieces, and we’re getting the RSS and pipes up and running.

We’re finding a great deal of convergence happening at the moment and wondering whether one day a coder in this arena will come up with a Universal Register, Login and Integration Application for all these wonderful web 2.0 apps. It’d have to be a Swiss Army Knife of an application, with a front end of username and password for the login and registration, plus an administration end for, well, administration, plus a tab toggler to load all the web 2.0 sites (rather like Firefox’s restore session facility — which we love).

Of course, then there’d have to be an RSS aggregator and a widget which would allow automatic cross-posting and tagging, and then a media disassembler to configure all content for the various different media carriers. As well as a styler to take a logotype or photo and a color palette across the range of applications/websites …

You might even specify which services you register with so that you could create several different packages depending on which part of your life you are representing.

Hmm, then you’d have to consider a name. And maybe as it registers you with all of the main players in the web 2.0 world, giving you a universal presence, ‘god’ would be an apt monika. Not sure. Smacks of omnipresence. Or omnipotence. Or hubris. So it could be personalised to ‘iGod’. Wonder whether Steve Jobs has registered it? Better go and check….

I’ve been holding off for a while, thinking myspace first then facebook, but I got an invite from Facebook, had to join, and lo! it was revelatory. Suffice to say this post will test the auto update on FB but I have no doubt it will update. I suspect I’ll spend the next few days mining the site’s functionalities and trying to integrate it with the Radio Fyneside project more fully than simply a syndication outlet. As my brother George says of FB, “This is Addictive!” – it is also alot better looking and therefore more useable than the truly awful myspace.

… I put all sorts of interesting and unusual pipe material. Some ready-rubbed from a great American supplier, some freshly clipped recently sent in from one of the local glens, and a highly intoxicating blend out of ebay. These and more have been sorted, ordered and blended to produce a lengthy and highly engaging break from the normal.

Perhaps stopping smoking in 2003 has finally tipped me into obsessional behaviour, but Yahoo pipes has created a myriad of possiblities and I can’t seem to get enough – maybe this is a new nicoteine replacement … Nicorette eat your heart out. Used in concert with Wordpress and a plugin InlineRSS, this online application has transformed the news gathering potential of one of the sites we regularly work on – Radio Fyneside. Already traffic is rocketing as we aggregate more and more stories about news locally.

For this post we have implemented the same system on our site and aggregated many of the arbu.biz Wordpress installations. The result is a fabulous grab-bag of entries about locality, ecommerce and more. To view the feed click here. Enjoy!