Blog Tips

Yahoo Pipes is a free Internet service by Yahoo, which allows you to aggregate and manipulate RSS feeds. I use them extensively for several of my aggregation sites like Humanitarian News and AidNews, to name a few.

Recently, Yahoo Pipes silently went from “Beta” to “Production”, a migration which was only noticed as the word “Beta” disappeared from their logo.

Let me correct that statement: when they went from “Beta” to “Production”, the only thing the users could notice was that their service became unreliable. Since about four weeks, users have been complaining on the Pipes discussion forum about problems saving and running their “pipes”.

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The past few weeks, I have been quite busy working with RSS feeds. I continue to be surprised about the possibilities RSS gives us, bloggers and web developers alike.

Here is an overview of the tools I discovered:

From RSS feed to Javascript: Feed2JS

If you want to spice up a page on your website, or integrate a feed into a blog widget, then have a look at Feed2JS. They offer an easy, fast and gratis way to convert any RSS feed into a simple Javascript. Each time the page with that Javascript is run, it displays the contents of the feed as if it were content on your page.

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We all use RSS mostly to read updates from different sites. What if we could reverse this, and use RSS to actually populate a site?
Here is a story of RSS, in reverse. Maybe we should call it SSR instead of RSS…

Both for work, and in my spare time, I scan the news (and the Internet as a whole) for humanitarian, aid and development articles.

1. Using RSS the conventional way

Up till recently I exclusively used PageFlakes, a simple tool allowing you to display a multitude of RSS feeds from different websites on one page.

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click for a high res view.

In a previous post I explained in laymen’s terms what RSS feeds are, and what they can do for you as a reader, and as a blogger.

A more technical post, described some of the technical tools I use to “transform” RSS feeds to different platforms.

As my “network” grew to 20+ blogs and aggregation sites, 40+ bookmarking sites and link collectors, I lost track, and it was time to map it all out.

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