blog.jemm.net

When I was constructing this blog, I wanted to share interesting items through a link blog, which is embedded as My Link Blog -box on the right (feed).

At first it simply showed only items that were shared through Google Reader’s Shared Items, which is a very nice feature in the feed reader. Then I realized that I have many other places where I share links: del.icio.us, dotnetkicks.com and digg.com.

Since publishing all the links in their own boxes would make the blog look too crowded, I thought this could be great opportunity to try Yahoo Pipes for combining the feeds into one RSS-feed. Luckily all the services allow accessing the shared data through RSS so all the data is easy to collect.

Pipes is a tool which you can use to mashup data (usually RSS-feeds) from various sources and edit and filter the data with numerous operations. The final result is exposed as HTML and RSS-feed, which I have used on this blog.

After playing around with various combinations, I decided to settle just for the data that comes from Google Reader and Digg.com as they provide most interesting content.

Here is a big picture from the current (13.8.2007) link blog logic:

In short, it takes two feeds, unions them together, filters out duplicate links, sorts them by date in descending order and finally truncates the list to 15 entries.

Here is a detailed picture about the operation settings at the end of the pipe:

As an interesting detail, I wanted to add the number of diggs an url has gotten. For that, I made the following loop with the string operations (String Builder inside a Loop-container):

The final result can be seen here.

In my opinion, Pipes are really easy to use, even for non-programmers. Experienced programmers may miss some operations, but still Pipes offers many nice possibilities with little effort. Here is a posting that shares 5 cool ways to use Pipes.