Hackers Like Pipes

Peter Nikolaidis of the Fresh Ubuntu podcast and I recently did an episode for Hacker Public Radio on Yahoo! Pipes, which I’ve mentioned here before. We had a lot of fun, and we’ll definitely be doing it again.

As for HPR itself, I haven’t listened a whole lot yet, but it seems kind of formal, all things considered, from the opening music to the tone adopted by those I’ve listened to so far. I’m more of a “vary your tone and have some fun” kind of listener myself. But we’ll see. Like I said, I’m only about 3 episodes into it.

For some reason, putting the link to embed the second youtube video (the embed link constructed by YouTube, no less) makes weird things happen to this post, so screw it. Sometimes it’s not worth fighting wordpress to figure out what it’s attitude problem is. Here’s part one, and a link to part two.

Find Part 2 of this screencast here.

Yahoo! Pipes… Smokin!

Recently my old pal Peter asked me to be on an upcoming Hacker Public Radio with him, and suggested we talk about Yahoo! Pipes. Not knowing a Yahoo! Pipe from a Google Bong, I thought I better do some learning. Like anything else, I suggest studying the works of others. Example source code.. well, in this case, example flowchart pipe thingys.

I like what I see so far. Honestly, a lot of the functionality is in the applications these pipes are tapping into. Flickr and YouTube, for example, have great API’s that let people have their way with their stuff. These guys realize that accessibility and data transfer and manipulation is how their stuff is gonna rule the world. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s just now making press conferences about it. Anyway…

Anyway, I’m gonna keep playing with these so I have something intelligent to say. Well… so that I have something to say. Ok, so that Peter won’t strangle me. Plus, they are cool! Check ‘em out.

More on Reader – Browsing for Blogs

One of the really cool features of google reader that I didn’t mention is the way searching for new blogs/rss feeds works.

Right beside “Add Subscription” in the navigation pane, click the “Browse >>” link.

You’ll see a screen now where you can choose predefined feed bundles, or enter a search term to match.

Once you do enter a search term and google reader’s found some matches, it gives you a listing and the ability to subscribe to each match.

Click the subscribe button on any that you want:

And right there, in very cool and handy style, is the ability to categorize it by moving it to a folder. No need to go into “manage subscriptions” at all.

Everyone knows google makes cool web apps, using ajax where appropriate, and generally not when it isn’t, but reader is, so far as I’ve seen, a great example of doing the right things for the task at hand and ignoring things that would be extraneous.

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Blog, computers, rss, software

Google my Reader

I like to support mac software authors, and I’m also not a huge fan of having my apps on the internet. But I finally switched to using google reader the other day for a couple reasons, and so far I’m more impressed than I thought I’d be. Part of that is my lowered expectations for rss readers these days though.

I’ve used a variety of rss readers on the mac – the now non-existant NewsMac Pro, by ThinkMac software, NewsFire, and more recently, NewsLife (again by ThinkMac). Below is a partial screen capture of NewsLife.

NewsLife is a great little app in a lot of ways, but it’s frustrating in others. OPML export doesn’t work yet – it’s in there, and it acts like it works, it just never actually creates a file for you.

Also, if you are reading a post in a feed, and you want to mark the feed read, you can’t – not unless you click on the feed name again to get out of the specific post and back to the article listing view for the feed.

Performing “Mark feed as read” while at this level won’t work:

At this level, “Mark feed as read” does work:

Anyway, among other things, I thought as long as I would be trying to sneak peaks at my rss feed at work, and you know I will, I might as well make it easy on myself. So I started entering feeds into google reader one by one (remember – NewsLife’s OPML export doesn’t work?!??).

Things I like:

I like the default views for the reader – the aggregate folder views and the rss feed listing views.

Things I don’t like:

I’m not so nuts about the “manage subscriptions” view as with hundreds of feeds it could quickly grow unweildy.

I also don’t like that, once you create a folder, it doesn’t seem possible to rename or delete that folder. What am I missing?

Adding a feed is easy enough:

After that, you can move it to a folder easily, as the newly added feed is shown in article list view for you:

Because you are in a browser, the feed and article listings show any posts that have images and layout just as your browser would – because it is your browser!

I’m happy enough with google reader that, well… the picture below says it all.

Technorati Tags:
computers, Blog, rss, software