Hack hack hack

My friend Akshat's start up, Activ, released a 'micro-blogging to blogspot via SMS' feature a couple of days ago. It's in alpha, running off a home internet connection, but I'm having fun playing around with it anyways.

I'm not very comfortable micro-blogging to my primary blog - the gods alone know what I might say in a moment of enthusiasm - so I created another blog, registered it with Activ and started posting from my phone. All was hunky dory. Now I wanted to embed a summary of my moblog posts in my main blog - something like the Twitter widget.

So first, I created a Yahoo Pipes app to read and modify (mangle?) the feed from my moblog. It takes the feed, truncates the content to a specified (configurable) number of characters and replaces the title of the post with the truncated content.

Next I tried to add this feed to my blog using the 'Display RSS' widget available in Blogger. At first it added it just fine, but a few minutes later Blogger started complaining it was an invalid feed for no reason I could find. I then tried another pipe based feed which had worked earlier and that didn't work anymore either. Curiouser and curiouser. Stumped, I spent some time prodding things in my pipes app hoping something would make the output palatable to Blogger, but no luck. Then inspiration struck - I ran the Pipes output into feedburner and sure enough, the feedburner output was kosher - you can see the result in the sidebar under 'Moblog Summary'.

Next I need to figure out if I can translate the time information embedded in the feed into 'a few minutes ago' and 'a few days ago' a la Twitter widget. All advice from Yahoo Pipes experts welcome.