First-step with Yahoo! Pipes
By Dr Chris P. Jobling
I’ve been reading a lot recently about Yahoo! Pipes so I thought I’d give it a try myself. I created a simple feed aggregator by merging the RSS feeds for my Google reader starred items, del.icio.us, and the RSS feed for this blog together and output as a new feed.
I had to do some minor manipulation, for example to remove duplicates (which you get when you star, bookmark or link-blog the same item) and to sort the merged feeds into descending order of publication date. Then I took the output of the resulting feed and added it to my iGoogle page. The result is a nice summary of my recent activities.
This was a very quick experiment, and I’m sure there’s a lot more that you can do: for example, only the link title and URL is captured, not the text, nor any multimedia content. But it’s very easy to use and worthy of further experimentation.
Comments:
gbswales - May 4, 2010
Well my experience as a child was one of hating maths - all that “chalk and theory” - when I had to visit maths again as part of my BSc I looked forward to being taught in a more imaginative way that might capture my interest - it turned out to be delivered by a lecturer using the same chalk and theory method (not to mention almost illegible handwritten photocopied notes). If anything I was even more turned off than the first time despite the 45 years of “progress” inbetween the two experiences. I once saw a more enlightened teacher presenting a lesson about fractions to primary kids - she spent most of the lesson discussing what fruit they liked and how they could share the fruit they collectively chose with their friends….the math bit came in the last few minutes of the teaching session but I am sure that the kids learnt more about fractions. Now I am not suggesting you get secondary kids cutting up bananas but I do think that starting any lesson from a practical illustration about why you might want to understand it is a good way to grab interest and attention - who is ever inspired by “you need to understand the basics before we move onto more interesting stuff”