learning the ropes

When we met last week, one of the things Wendy and I discussed was going shopping for inspiration: hardware stores, fabric stores, etc.

I mentioned that ITP has maintained various lists of good places to find materials:

• Materials at ITP
• Tom Igoe’s Resources

Here are some that I think will be interesting to visit in the NYC area:

• Build it Green – NYC (Astoria, Queens) – reclaimed building materials warehouse
• Fikret Fabrics (Manhattan) – “discount fabrics, bargains, and close-outs” (quote from ITP materials site)
• Frank Tracy (Greenpoint, Brooklyn) – bearings and mechanical parts (a transmission supplier)
• Home Depot (23rd St, Manhattan, but I prefer New Jersey locations for selection)
• Homefront 24 hour Hardware and Lumber (Murray Hill, Manhattan)
• Lowe’s (located in Brooklyn, but I’ve only visited the New Jersey location) – similar to a Home Depot
• Materials for the Arts (Long Island City)
• New York Central Art Supply (East Village, Manhattan)
• Space Surplus Metals (Canal Street, Manhattan) – various metals… review says that you should appear to be knowledgeable in order to get the best price and service.
• Spandex House (Manhattan)

[Michael posting as Wendy] Now the two blogs are syndicating one another.  Let’s see if duplicates begin to appear.  I’ll leave the system alone for the afternoon and check back later to see what has happened.

[update] As of 2:54pm, this post didn’t make it over to ropeandpulley.com; however, it was seen by Google Reader when I fed the feed (http://wendyrichmond.com/blog/category/collaborations/overheard/feed/) into it.

What happens if I delete a post that was syndicated? Does it still stay in the recipient’s blog?

In order for Wendy and I to maintain a shared information space as we work on the installation at the University of California at San Diego, I’m configuring both of our blogs to utilize the FeedWordPress plugin which acts as a content aggregator (and cross posts between our blogs).  What I want to happen is anytime I post items to my “collaborations->overheard” category, they will automatically be posted into Wendy’s blog and vis-a-versa.  We’ll still need to figure out what she wants to name her categories.

The other potentially tricky bit is that we may end up with some sort of circular reference if her posts and my posts are mutually syndicated.  If her blog is pulling in posts from my “collaborations->overheard” category and publishing them to the same category that my blog is pulling out of, won’t we end up with an endless loop?

A quick brainstorm of how to solve the problem if mutually syndicating the feeds does indeed cause an endless loop…

• take a look at the “remove duplicates” plugin for FeedWordPress
• investigate whether categories can be hidden in Wordpress and whether it is possible to make categories which are the union of other categories.  If these are possible, I could write my shared posts using a hidden category  Collaborations->Overheard.outbound (which Wendy’s blog subscribes to).  I could categorize (on my blothe posts that Wendy writes on her blog as a hidden category Collaborations->Overheard.inbound.  At the same time, I would create a third visible category Collaborations->Overheard which is the union of both Collaborations->Overheard.inbound and Collaborations->Overheard.outbound which will be displayed on my site.  This composite category will allow me to display both the inbound and outbound posts as a single category on my blog and prevent a loop between our two blogs.
• Yahoo Pipes could be used to generate the composite feed…