I attended the first half of the Pipes lab and following up by catching some of the lightening talks.
Yahoo Pipes notes
About
- will mash up various data formats; e.g. RSS1, RSS2, atom
- will normalise out from multiple input formats
- can output as XML, JSON, stub of PHP, image/media version of feed, etc.
- each pipe has a unique URI
- uses a GUI interface, with flow chart style objects, to create new feeds
- requires a Yahoo account
- pipes can be claimed or cloned, NB: only an owner can only delete a pipe
- could a useful tool for useful for examining feeds
Sources of data
- RSS
- CSV
- HTML
- Yahoo searches/queries
- existing pipes
Downsides
- Don’t seem to be able to export the structure of the feed mash up
- A third party hosted service
Alternatives
The open source version, Deri pipes, can be locally hosted.
Notes on uses of modules Can mash up search RSS feeds (e.g. Plone/WordPress search results) and pass in arguments
– see url builder and user input modules
Bear in mind if using search RSS results these feeds may be paginated or limited to n number of output
– example uses uses search term – url builder – fetch feed – output
Can compound your feeds, i.e. call a search feed for each search result of another feed – see loop function
Private input – protects for instance API keys from cloned pipes
– remember there can be many levels of caching – at source, in yahoo pipes, in your own application
Lightening Talks
I attending lightening talks about WordPress, Teaching programming to non programmers and building Android applications.
Android phone application notes
- Use Eclipse IDE (plugin may be necessary)
- Install Android SDK, includes
- emulator
- command line tool
- demo code
- Uses a locked version of Linux
- API demos is good demo code to look at