Sorry for the lack of updates, I’ve been working on a pretty large project that has eaten much of my time. Posting should be a little more regular in a couple of weeks, and I should plop in some new stuff soon.
Yearly Archives: 2009
Yahoo Pipes + CSV = Aggregated RSS
You can use Yahoo Pipes to create an aggregated RSS feed from a CSV file you maintain. It’s fairly easy too, which is awesome. For those who are not familiar with Yahoo Pipes, it’s a beta product by Yahoo that makes it easy to create simple mashups of content available on the Internet, read more about it on the Yahoo Pipes homepage if you so please.
Simple aggregated RSS Feed with Pipes
Answering a question that was posed at work regarding RSS feeds and Yahoo Pipes.
Q: How can I make an aggregated RSS feed in Pipes?
A: If you have a set of RSS feeds you’d like to include in an aggregated feed, simply drag the fetch feed module into the workspace and click the addition (plus) button to add more source URLs for the module. Then send the output to the pipe output. When you name and save the pipe, you’ll be able to get it as an RSS feed, or in a multitude of other formats.
linker – Decoupled Link List Management
Occasionally, you’ll have a project where one of the last minute ideas is to add a manageable list of links to a webpage or series of webpages. Nothing fancy, just a list of links that can be plopped into a layout.
Well, this little project allows you to quickly set up a web-based administration for simple link lists. This isn’t a full blown manager, but simply a piece of a larger project. Should readily integrate into existing solutions if you’re willing to do some code. At any rate, you provide the links in an easy to use back-end and then can pull that list in a variety of formats by hitting index.php (or whatever you choose to actually pull the list, it’s fairly easy to change.) Currently by default it can give you a raw html list, an rss feed, or the list in javascript form. Simply unpack it, make sure the data folder is writeable, set the password in config.php and then hit admin.php and off you go. A demo is available. It’s reset every half hour, and the password is ‘demo’.
I plan to release a version with some link generators for this in the coming weeks, until then you’ll need to hand-write the actual URLs to pull the lists.
Fight evil, or be evil?
I’ve set up a little thing while playing with wildcard DNS on this domain. A faux-news story that you can modify by changing the sub-domain in the URL. Here is an excerpt from Bill Gates and Steve Jobs:
METROPOLIS – In the slums of Metropolis Bill Gates’s villainous deeds have been put to a stop for the foreseeable future. The hero, Steve Jobs has been credited for this tremendous feet.
It all transpired a few days ago when Bill Gates robbed First Banana Bank on the corner of 4th and Pacific.
Now how it works:
http://bill.gates.steve-jobs.sh.rrbits.com/
To modify it, simply change these two pieces of the URL. As you can see here, the hero’s name is given right before the .sh portion of the URL with hyphens (or dashes if you call them that) replaced with spaces and the villain’s name before that separated by periods. So to make it the opposite, you’d make the URL http://steve.jobs.bill-gates.sh.rrbits.com/ try it out with your friend’s names or with off-the-wall names and send it to your friends.
Easily import sitewide comments – WPMU
One of my work responsibilities is the administration and development of a WordPress MU installation, Puget Sound Blogs. Someone suggested adding a feed of the most recent comments onto the front page, but obviously this isn’t terribly easy to do with WPMU, unless you have the sitewide comments plugin. http://wpmudev.org/project/Sitewide-recent-comments
Now the problem with this plugin becomes: What do I do to import my old comments. It’s fairly easy to simply export and re-import the comments, but I found this to be rather time consuming. So I wrote this script to do it all for me. Keep in mind that you’ll need to change which tables you use if they are different and whatnot, but it sure saved me a lot of time anyway.
