A while back I decided to migrate away from Tumblr in favor of less tightly joined, less strictly formatted bits of publication, often using flat HTML and CSS and relying on basic filesystem routing. But I still needed a way to maintain aggregation and in that case I didn't want to go for flat HTML, especially considering I'd need to duplicate everything (on my "index page" and in its accompanying RSS feed).

So I did this. There's a Yaml file that takes an array of objects, each containing a title, URL, publish date, and description, and spits them out in any way I desire.

These are the bones of the operation, including a few useful helpers that sort the items and don't publish any whose publish timestamp are in the future (which means easy post scheduling). I opted for no pagination, so everything is spit out on a single page, but it should be apparent where to make changes if such an approach is desired.

Scattered Feed uses Symfony's Yaml library. SmartyPants is also included though I suppose it isn't necessary.