Nov
20
2009
Yahoo! Pipes for Twitter's Reading List
I've managed to create a very nice and probably useful Yahoo! Pipe to manage my Twitter friend's feed as a reading list. As you know, nowadays it's a common practice to post interesting links to your Twitter feed. Even I personally hooked up my Google Reader with the help of Twitterfeed to post articles that I want to share directly to my feed on Twitter. Works well, except that I miss a lot of links. I can't read my friends feed all day long (and I'm following only a hundred or so people). So whenever I read the feed (very occasionally) I can hit the shared links of only that period of time. I don't browse history or anything like that.
However, I'd probably like to read all the links that they advice to visit. I'm pretty picky about whom I'm following. You can call it social news. Where your social circle is doing the job on filtering the news for you. And you end up with a list of "pre-approved" things that you're safe to go with, without high risk of wasting your time. Anyways so I run into this venture and built a quick hack for myself. http://pipes.yahoo.com/white/twitterreading I call it Twitter Reading List. You put your name & password in there (yeah, I can be a asshole and copy your data, so take a look at the source first if you're afraid of it :), and you will get a RSS feed of all posts from your Twitter friends, whom you follow and who posted something interesting. This pipe will fetch a title of it for you, as well as link it to direct link to whatever your friend wants you to read. Well, yeah, on the negative side, I don't like the idea of sending my password plain-text, but... whatever. One more thing, it looks like it's limited to some specific number of posts there. It's probably possible to overcome, I don't know. So fire it up, link to your Google Reader or any other favorite news reader and have fun! P.S. IT IS buggy. It's a dirty hack and I need to fix the regexp for URLs among many other things, but it works. P.P.S. Yahoo! Pipes rock. This is definitely a great way to easily sketch up a tool and use it right away. Try it yourself.
Oct
12
2009
That's a nice how-to for Yahoo Pipes
Yahoo Pipes is many things, but the one important to this article is its ability to allow you to create a mashup of RSS feeds with filters and restrictions. The beauty of Yahoo Pipes is that it was developed to allow the average business user to create rich applications without any programming experience. I have spent countless hours on Yahoo Pipes developing “pipes”. It truly is an amazing tool.
Yahoo! Pipes is a pretty old product, however, I still believe it's an interesting one and you can find dozen of implementation cases right away and from the top of your head.
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