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. :)
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