Pubwich is the open source PHP social aggregation app. I wrote about it a couple weeks back covering some of what it actually does. Well I decided yesterday that I would spend some time installing and configuring Pubwich on my server to see how cool it actually is. Needless to say, I am impressed!
Pubwich in concept is actually pretty simple. A PHP web app that once installed and configured, pulls the most recent data from various Social Media/networking sites around the web. These include
- Youtube
- Vimeo
- Last.fm
- Delicious
- And any other RSS feed (like your blogs rss feed)
But just because the concept is simple, don’t let that understate the complexity behind the code. The contributors behind Pubwich have worked hard to develop this open source app for us to use and benefit from. It’s complex. It’s highly technical. And it works like a charm!
The application is fairly easy to install and configure if you are comfortable enough opening up a config file and sifting through some PHP code. It was pretty easy to install on my bluehost account. I had to setup a CRON job to get it to update every 30 minutes with my most recent social data. The readme instructions walk you through everything step by step. Here is what I was able to put together:
Can you see the benefits behind what I just created for myself with Pubwich? Do you see how you will benefit from this?
Think about this for a second. This application aggregates all of my most recent social data onto my own self-hosted application on my own domain name. Because of this I can better interact publicly with people who are just getting to know me. People who read my blog can get to know me a little more on a personal level by seeing my photos, videos and so forth.
And better yet, because it is self-hosted the information is mine! This page is searchable through Google. And it becomes an asset to my blog. It’s in an environment where I can brand myself rather than some 3rd party service. Do you see the benefit of this?
A Few Integrations I Hope To See In the Near Future With Pubwich
- Facebook Photos
- Stumbleupon
- Posterous
- Tumblr
If someone can help contribute to those integrations, this thing is going to be an open source masterpiece. I’m excited to see what Pubwich can evolve into the coming 6 months or so. What do you guys think of Pubwich? What do you think of the one I setup?
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Hello,
I’m Pubwich’s main developer and I’m happy to see what you did with Pubwich
For the services you’d like to see in a future version, I’ll add them to my todo-list.
But I’m pretty sure all of those services are able to output data to an Atom or RSS. So in the meantime, you could use those Atom and RSS feeds to display your data in Pubwich.
But Digg, reddit and StumbleUpon are on my todo-list
Hey that’s great news! It’s already a sweet tool, but once you add Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon it will be even cooler! Thanks for your dedication to your open source project. It’s always refreshing to see developers like yourself contributing such high quality code! Let us know when you have a new version come out.