When we started working on Spotstory, Aron and I had many conversations like this:

Matthew: “Oh, we should have a feature like [some feature]!”

Aron: “Yeah, and you should be able to get it via an RSS feed!”

Matthew: “Uh, okay … oh, and we could do this thing where we [do some other thing]”

Aron: “Definitely!  Oh, and you should be able to get at it with an RSS feed!”

And so on.

Now, I’ve simplified this conversation a lot to make a point (that is, I’m not implying that Aron’s only contribution to the site’s design was to follow up each statement I made with “and we should make it available with a feed!”)

What I am trying to point out, is that from day zero we made a decision to have Spotstory be as open as possible, and a major aspect of that was to have data bubbling out of all these RSS feeds.

I didn’t quite appreciate this at the time (but I should have, since I’ve long been a “open an API to your software and people will do unexpected things that amaze you” kind of guy.)

Anyway, a couple days ago I was thinking, “It would be cool if we could have a list of recently created Spots in the sidebar of the blog.”

And then it occurred to me: there has to be a WordPress plugin out there somewhere that will do this.  And if there is, I know we have the feed.

If you haven’t already, cast your eyes over to the sidebar and see a happy little list of the most recently created Spots on Spotstory.  It took five minutes–literally–to put it together. (It took longer to write this blog entry!)

Special thanks to Chris Hatcher and his nifty SideRSS WordPress plugin and thanks to Aron, too,  for having the foresight to make sure we did the right thing from the start.

Update

I just realized that if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you won’t see the sidebar!  Oh, the irony.