Tag:

rss

September 10, 2009 /

Playing with pipes

The ever-informative Twitter alerted me recently to the History Trust of South Australia’s object of the month. It made me think that it would be nice if there was some way of bringing together all those objects, photos and documents featured by our cultural institutions. Some sort of combined RSS feed perhaps?

Something like this…

Well, yes… I couldn’t resist having a go. My tool of choice for this was Yahoo Pipes which has various modules for manipulating and creating RSS feeds. Check out my script on the Yahoo Pipes site to create a badge like this, play some more or inspect its innards. If you’re feeling adventurous you can even clone the script and tinker away yourself – it’s the best way to learn. Read MorePlaying with pipes

February 4, 2009 /

ADB DIY RSS

So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if the Australian Dictionary of Biography‘s ‘born on this day‘ feature could be made available as an RSS feed. Every morning you’d get a new list of biographies delivered direct to your feed reader. And so…

[sounds of xpath wrangling and PHP coding]

here it is.

It’s pretty simple – it harvests all the links of people born on the current day, then loops through the links to gather the first paragraph of each biography. Then it’s just a matter of writing everything to an RSS file. Read MoreADB DIY RSS