So I finally broke down today and started working on my first WordPress plugin. I liked how recent links worked, but I wanted an aggregated list of both links I found interesting and my Flickr photos. I was going to hack the recent links plugin that I had used, but decided against it in the end. In the end I decided that it made sense to store my interesting links on del.icio.us and my photos on Flickr and then aggregate them into a single list, which is what you see now below this post.

This way my photos stay on Flickr and my links stay on del.icio.us, but they show up inline on my blog’s frontpage. I’ve got a few bugs and kinks to work out still, but it’s definitely ready for beta testing. If you are interested in playing with it then give me a shout and I’ll package it up for you to test out.

• Integrates with Flickr and stores photo and tag information into a MySQL table.
• Integrates with del.icio.us and stores link and tag information into a MySQL table.
• Uses PEAR’s DB and HTML_Request packages and PHP5’s SimpleXML extension to seemlessly fetch and cache new content every hour or every time an admin visits the website.