It's all a series of tubes, Part 3: I'll bet you think this Pipe is about you

In Part 1 of this series, I discussed how I was looking to simplify managing my social networking content, both incoming and outgoing.  I talked about how Ping.fm made updating statuses for multiple sites as easy as it had been for just one.  In Part 2, I talked about using Yahoo Pipes as a way to aggregate incoming RSS streams from my Twitter follows into one feed that I could then enter into a feed reader.  This part is all about my favorite subject: ME!  I'm going to create what I've been calling a "vanity feed". 

 

As mentioned in Part 1, I write quite a bit of material that ends up on the Interwebs.  Every time I write something new, I will generally post a link in Facebook so my friends and family can bask in my brilliance.  I also want it posted to places like Linked In so my professional contacts can be amazed with my talents as well.  What?  It's called a vanity feed for a reason!  :)  A problem I have, though, is that Facebook only allows you to subscribe to one RSS feed.  Also, with to respect to my fellow Tuners, while I want all of my posts from iPhoneTunes.net to show up I don't want anything else.  So, let's get started.

 

As before, we're going to start with a Fetch Feed source.   But, I don't want the whole iPhoneTunes.net feed, so we're going to need to filter that.   Expand Operators and looky there...a Filter tool!   Just like most other tasks in Pipes, this tool is fairly straightforward to use.  The site owner of iPhoneTunes.net always puts our names at the top of any reviews we do.  So, if I click the Fetch Feed tool, I see the whole feed in the debugger.  But, if I pipe the output of the Fetch Feed into the Filter, which I've told to permit only those items that have my name, we see the only thing to come out of this Pipe is my latest review.  One feed down, and this whole process took less than two minutes to do.  Not too shabby, right?

 

Now we turn to the other feeds.  Those area a bit more straightforward as I really just want the output from them.  So, add another Feed Fetch source and enter the URLs to the other two feeds into it.  But, now we have two sources and if you look at the Pipe Output tool, you'll see it's only got one input!  Fortunately, there's an easy solution: the Union tool.   This simple tool provides multiple inputs and a single output.  If we attach it to the Pipe Output and then highlight that, we see we've got my one iPhoneTunes.net entry and all of the entries from this blog.  It pulled all of them, so you can't see the TEDxRochester blog items in the debugger, but they're there.

But, this does present an issue.  See, aside from the posts in this "Series of tubes" series, I've already posted all of the above items to the places I want to feed with this mashup.  If I publish this feed, it's going to repost everything I've already posted and annoy a lot of people.  That's not a good thing!  I'm trying to show my tech skills and I go and do a multi-post.  What I need to do is filter even further and only take out anything that was posted prior to today (11/15/2009).  In theory, once I'm done, the only things that should be in my debugger window should be these three blog posts.  So, let's add another filter box:

 

 

As you can see, we need another special tool, the Date Builder.  I honestly don't know why I can't just type a date into that filter field, but that's the way Pipes does it.  The output from this source doesn't go into the input of another tool, it goes to a data connection.  In the picture above, it's not clear, but this field is connected to the little dot to the right of the rule in the bottom filter.  And, that's it.  For the heck of it I add a Sort operator so that multiple items posted in one day will show up in the order posted, but that's it.  The only output I get are the two blog entries for today...three as soon as I publish this one.  Going forward, if I post a new review, update for next year's TEDxRochester or just want to share some knowledge here, it'll go to all of my social networking sites without my having to do a thing.

 

Knowledge management is always easiest when you don't actually have to do anything. :)

 

 

It's all a series of tubes, Part 2: And what is a Pipe if not a tube?

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how I've started putting out a lot more information to different groups and how I'm using Ping.fm to make my outgoing flow easier to manage.  Now I needed to take care of everything coming in.  As mentioned previously, I'm using an RSS reader (Google Reader, to be specific) to manage news, and I wanted to try and leverage that technology.  If for no other reason than I look at my reader multiple times per day to keep up, it seemed to be my best option. 

 

Twitter seems to concur since they export everyone's tweets as an RSS feed.  I decided that making these feeds easier to manage would give me the opportunity to try out a technology I'd read about a few years back, but never really put any effort into: Yahoo Pipes.  Yahoo describes Pipes as "a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web".  With no programming, you can use Pipes to aggregate or filter data from the web in a way that's meaningful to or works for you. 

 

Clicking the Create Pipe button brings us into the Pipe editor.  Like I said, there's no programming involved in the creation of a Pipe.  You simply drag operators or inputs from the left onto the canvas and you can visually see how your data will flow and be manipulated.  At the bottom is the debugger which will show you what your data looks like at any step in the process.   Since this first Pipe I'm creating is just to aggregate multiple Twitter feeds into one, I've dragged the Fetch Feed tool onto the editor page.  At the bottom, another operator appears called Pipe Output.  This represents your finished product.

 

 

Now that I've got my fetcher added, I need to populate it.  I head over to Twitter.com and visit the pages of those people I'm interested in following most closely.  On everyone's page, you'll find a link to an RSS feed.  Simply right-click it and choose "Copy link location".  Paste the first one into the URL field of the Fetch Feed bubble.  To add additional feeds, click the "+" above the URL box to add an additional field. 

 

 

If I click on the Fetch Feed source, it turns orange.  The really interesing bit happens in the debugger, though:

 The fetcher, once highlighted, does its job and you see the result.  It has fetched all of the items from the RSS feeds and is showing me what my output would be if I ended the chain here.  Unfortunately, at the moment, only one person has tweeted recently enough to show you.  But, were there tweets from other people, you'd see all of the intermingled into one continuous stream. 

Since this is just supposed to be a simple aggregator, I'm going to end it here.  To do so, simply click the little bubble on the bottom of the Fetch Feed source.  You'll see the bubble on the top of the Pipe Output tool turns orange.  This is to let you know that it's an acceptable place to terminate the pipe that's now coming out of the bottom of the feed fetcher.  Simply drag that pipe down and drop it onto the output tool and a link is formed.  If you then click on the Pipe Output tool, you'll see the debugger refresh and the same data as before will display.  That's it, we've now got a simple aggregator for our Twitter feeds.  Hit the Save button, give it a name and we're done!

 So, now what do we do with this?  Well, click on My Pipes at the top of the page.  Your new Pipe will show in the list.  Click it, and you should see the tweet feed.  All you need to do now is right click the "Get as RSS" link, choose "Copy link location" and paste it into your feed reader.  If you use Yahoo or Google Reader, it's even easier: just click the button.

Now, this was just a simple first Pipe to get our feet wet, but it really shows how powerful this tool can be.  It gets even more powerful when you start to take advantage of the filtering capabilities as well.  But, that's for Part 3...

 

 

It's all a series of tubes, Part 1: Ping 'em all and let THEM sort it out.

Recently, I became the licensee for an exciting event called TEDxRochester.  As a result of this event, I've begun networking with a lot of the great folks in my area.  Prior to this, I'd used social networking sites primarily as a vehicle to share pictures of my daughter with friends and family.  I had a Linked In account, but it barely got any use.  Now that I've got a lot of folks to keep up with, and who are interested in keeping up on me, I'm working on changing that. 

 

One aspect that's taken a bit of my time is aggregation.   I've started following a bunch of people on Twitter and I've ramped up my connections on Linked In.  Aside from this blog and the one at TEDxRochester.com, I also write reviews for iPhoneTunes.net.  And, on top of that, I've still got my private connections on Facebook to keep track of.  Information overload, here I come!

 

I use an RSS feeder everyday, so it only made sense that I should try to find a way to leverage what I'm already using to keep track of people.  When I first created this blog, I added it to my Linked In profile via its RSS feed.  After all, as the first entry stated, this blog was to serve as a living resume for potential future employers should I ever have need of one.  (Yes, I know, I should probably update it more often then.)  At the time, you could only add one blog or RSS feed, and I wanted the ability to aggregate everything I write into one, easy to use feed.  I also want to keep these many different groups informed of my doings, but it has to be easy to manage.  After all, I've already got a full day.  Adding more "work" just to keep track of people just wouldn't fit.

 

Since I knew that all of these activities would result in my needing to update my statuses a bit more frequently, I decided to start by simplifying that task.  For example, if I wrote a new review at iPhoneTunes.net, I'd typically post a link to Facebook & Linked In.  But, now that I've actually become active on Twitter,  I would need to tweet this new review as well.  If I wrote a new article for the TEDxRochester blog, I'd have to post it to Linked In, Facebook, the TEDxRochester fan page on Facebook AND Twitter.  I just knew there had to be an easier way to do all of this, and there is...it's called Ping.fm.

 

Ping.fm acts as a central dashboard to the status boxes for all of your social networking sites.  At last count, they support some 60ish services like Facebook and Linked In, but also some distant, esoteric ones I've never even heard of.  For me, flexibility was key, and Ping.fm provides it in the form of posting groups.   These allow you to tie different social networking sites together so you can have granular control over who sees what.  There are some things that I only want to share with a very limited, private group, and there are some that the whole world can see.  I accomplished this by creating the following groups:

 

Professional: This group is where I post things that I want to be available to everyone.  Anything posted to this group is visible to the world, so family vacation pictures wouldn't go here, but if I found an interesting article about some new technology I could post the link in this group.  Anything posted here goes to Linked In and Twitter.  It also goes to Facebook as well.  After all, being a geek, I have a lot of geek friends who might not pay attention to my Linked In profile.

 

Private:  For the moment, this one just goes to Facebook.  I could do Facebook by itself, but I'm getting myself in the habit of using the group instead, just in case I decide in the future to add something else. 

 

TEDxRochester:  This is where I post news about next year's event.  I also post random things that might in some way be related.  For example, my wife and I were watching The History Channel's "The Universe" last night and Adam Frank, who is regularly on the show, was explaining about pulsars and quasars.  I watch shows like this all the time where they bring on experts, but since Adam was our first speaker at the inaugural event, he was the first one I've ever met from one!  So, I posted a quick item about it.  This one's my biggest group, it posts to Facebook, the Facebook fan page, Linked In and Twitter. 

 

I also have a del.icio.us account, so any time I post a link to any of the above groups, it's automatically added to my bookmarks.  How cool is that?

 

It didn't take long before I fell completely in love with Ping.fm for updating my statuses (statusii?).  It's very well laid out, very easy to use and free.  I now spend as much time updating up to five different sites as easily as I would any one of them, if not easier.  If you've got a lot of social sites to update, you owe it to yourself to check it out. 

 

Okay, now that I've got outgoing information organized and easy to control, it was time to tackle incoming.  Being only one person, though, outgoing was a lot easier...