The FTOTW Curation project – 100 weeks,439 sources,1269 articles
TweetI have been trying to share interesting articles I read since September 22, 2006 on this blog. I call it the Fine Tastings of the Week – FTOTW in short. Fine tastings, in case you are wondering, is in keeping with the blog’s theme – knowledge is scrumptious. I tried all types of strategies to continue sharing but nothing really worked for me in making it a habit.
In Dec 2007 I joined twitter. It took me a while to figure out how to handle that medium. I started sharing interesting articles and that seemed to resonate with my followers and started doing more of that.
One thing I noticed is that I had no ability to archive the key tweets even for my own reference. I also decided to create a rating system so that I can rate articles I share. I then decided that I could combine the FTOTW project with twitter to create a weekly compilation.
I talked to A.Prem . He created a Yahoo Pipe for me that would filter the curated tweets into a list and I would then blog it.
As a software engineer, this manual method didn’t make me happy. I then requested Sudar Muthu to help me develop a wordpress plugin that will automatically create a post every week out of the curated articles. It has been a labor of love for Sudar working through Twitter’s constantly changing APIs and ToS.
In fact for a time, I was posting the curated tweets manually into wordpress because the latest ToS from Twitter prevented us from directly reading my own twitter stream!
Finally we hit upon IFTTT service to fully automate the entire process. please read Sudar’s detailed write up on how the FTOTW plugin works . Kudos to Sudar for his indefatigable attitude.
There is now a river page which is constantly updated and also a gamified Leaderboard that tells me who is the best source for me. Currently, Dorai Todla and Pavan Yara are tied for the first place. As a thank you, I plan to gift them both a book of their choice. Kudos Dorai and Pavan.
Hopefully, you will agree that after 100 digests, the habit is now ingrained in me. Thanks to all those who encourage me in this effort – Veena Tamvada, Ruchi Bhatia and a lot of my Twitter followers who RT and interact with my curated tweets. These have been a major source of strength as I do this every week without fail.
Do you enjoy the weekly digest on this blog? Any suggestions for improvement you have?
BTW, Sudar and I are proud to announce that we have made the plugin available to anyone under a open source GPL license on Github.
I really enjoy the weekly digest. I do not possess any social footprint , primarily because I feel that with my nature , I will get addicted very fast. I like to learn , explore , read , talk to friends and if I do have twitter and facebook , I might simply not log off 🙂
This is where your FTOTW comes pretty useful. I get to read the best picks and hence stay updated. I share some of the picks with my network as well. Please do continue to share. Thanks for all the weeks gone by and Thanks in advance for the weeks coming up.
Thanks Veena for your encouragement. Glad you find the digest useful.
Thank you very much for the wonderful curation. It helped me a lot and I got inspired by the curation and start implemented it . Personally learnt lot and the links shared by you has increased my intellectual curiosity. Please convey my thanks and wishes to Sudarmuthu for his support in this initiative.
Thanks for the kind words Dhivakar. Glad to know that you have also started curating.