One of the benefits of web services is that you can string together complex systems out of simpler ones. This brings to mind a quote from Leslie Lamport:
A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable.
Here's the short version of the build notes for the Plazes list of recent locations on the right side of this weblog, which tries to tell you where I have been recently. You will note that the long path of the packets.
First, start with Peter Rukavina's Plazes Traces + XSLT = RSS. You'll need to copy out the XSLT provided to your own server and edit to tweak it a little to have your name instead of Peter's but you don't need to know any XSLT to make it work. The traces live in Germany, but my XSLT is in Michigan and the XSLT transformer is wherever w3c.org is (Massachusetts I'll bet).
Next, burn this RSS feed with Feedburner to make it properly cached so that every page refresh of your RSS feed doesn't force someone else's system to do a transform. They're in Chicago and maybe their servers are too.
Finally, run this Feedburner feed through their BuzzBoost RSS-to-Javascript service which will create a tidy little piece of Javascript for you to include. Put that wherever your weblog puts it - I use a Typepad Typelist, in particular a Notes Typelist to hold the code. But really you could put it anywhere. Typepad's servers are in California.
What you get when you're done: a relatively tidy list of all of the recent places you have been in Plazes, though not really what I want, which is a Javascript include to have a badge showing where I am right now with a little map. But it's getting there. The bits go (Germany,Michigan)->Massachusetts->Chicago->California, with lots of caching, and then back out to you.
Thanks to the Plazes team, Felix and Stefan; Peter Rukavina for the XSLT transform; Ted Guild and the W3C team for the XSLT server, which I am trying very hard not to abuse; the Feedburner crew in Chicago, including Rick Klau, who has a new baby and who is not sleeping very much right now; and the Typepad team, the recently married Anil Dash, Michael Sippey, and Deborah Schultz plus everyone else there.
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