Singpolyma

Technical Blog

Pipes

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So if you read any blog besides mine (and surely you do) you’ve by now head of Yahoo’s Pipes application. Mashups without programming, and a team that’s promising more and better things to come.

One of the immediate uses to the Blogger community occurred to virtually all hackers at once. Sorting the feeds. This has never been a problem for me (I screen-scrape my feed via hAtom), but for others the fact that Blogger feeds sort by when they were updated is annoying.

Aditya suggested creating individual pipes, but I wrote a sorting pipe, as did Ramani (who beat me to blogging about it and has a nice how-to written). Ramani discovered an issue that causes this solution to be a bit buggy just yet. It has to do with ATOM being stupid and RSS 2.0 being cool (yes, that’s a partisan statement and not entirely true 😉 ). Basically the publishing date is not being copied from the ATOM format to the RSS format correctly. Vote on Ramani’s suggestion to get this fixed. I also discovered a less critical issue with the UI that may confuse some less geeky users. Please vote on my suggestion to get that fixed.

I also wrote a pipe for mixing together Google Calendars (for those of us who track events from more than one) into a nice, sorted feed of upcoming events. The email alerts system provided by Y! is dumb though, at least for this application. I want the next 5 events emailed to me every day… likely gonna have to write my own emailer for that…

One Response

Ramani

Steven,

Thanks for asking your readers to vote for my suggestion too.

This lightbox for comment is catchy!

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