YK Renovations

Over the weekend I started the first steps toward redesigning yewknee.com. This design has been here for awhile and I'm curious to spruce it up a bit. The first step in that process is to make sure the technology behind the scenes is in a good spot - which, currently, it is not. At the the moment, I'm running a cron job to poll for new posts from Twitter, Soundcloud, Delicious, etc and put them in the sidebar. Occasionally there's a real hiccup in the process and things start to duplicate. It's a real mess.

Enter Zapier, my saving grace from this methodology. Instead of having a script that is constantly looking for new updates, Zapier pushes an update when one exists. The event driven functionality will require less server resources and likely ensure that there's a whole lot less duplication.

The only snafu I've encountered so far is that retrieving "Likes" from YouTube is an enormous pain. Zapier doesn't support such a thing and the Youtube API requires constant authentication to retrieve that insight. It's a huge beast and I can't understand why they make such a high barrier for entry. Whatever happened to RSS feeds?