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StumbleUponI write this as I sit in the San Diego airport having just finished up another spectacular two days of code, design and content. If you are so inclined, I recommend An Event Apart as the best damn web development conference, period. My perspective during this AEA was quite different from the one I attended in 2008, as I’m no longer working on a large external-facing site, but rather a large internal site. As a result, I’m afforded much more latitude in my design decisions and am able to apply much of what I’ve learned. I’m especially excited since I’m just starting a project that can have a large measure of what I’ve seen implemented within. Much respect and admiration to all of the presenters. And much thanks to Jeffrey Zeldman and Eric Meyer for putting together this great conference and building this community of developers and designers.
Jan 21, 2009 0
Pipes? I got your Pipes right here.
So I recently found myself using Yahoo! Pipes. I wanted to aggregate all the RSS feeds from local newspapers, filter the articles for those that mentioned the Company (which is what I will henceforth call the place at which I hold a steady job), and consume it in the Company’s new web app I’m working on. I’d heard of Pipes a few years back, but I never had the reason to use it. It’s a great tool and dead simple to use. We could probably use it to replace the (what I’m sure is expensive) news aggregator service that culls industry news and articles that mention the Company from publications across the country. Well, maybe eventually.
Anyway, creating the pipe was easy and using the interface was actually quite fun. I’m pulling from almost 40 different feeds, filtering for mentions of the Company’s name in both the title, and the articles themselves, and now have one single feed I can now use. On the web app end I’m using the ever-powerful and omnipotent jQuery to consume the feed in the JSON format. Now, I’m not going to go in-depth in how this is accomplished, but rather I want to throw out this “gotcha” moment I experienced and hopefully, help at least one of the two people who will ever see this post avoid my mistake.