I’m feverishly checking off my list of things to do before Opening Day and happy to report that another task is more or less complete: One of the casualties of my old magically disappearing web host, PadreBlogs.com, is back up and running.
- Bad news: The old functionality, which identified and linked to the most recent article at each site, is gone.
- Good news: I never loved that functionality. What I really want is a river of news.
I’ve seen a couple of tutorials involving Yahoo! Pipes to create such a river, but my kung-fu just isn’t that good. So, I make a humble request: If you have the chops and the desire to help the Padres blogging community, please drop me a line at info@padreblogs.com and let’s make this bad boy fly.
Thanks,
gy
Update: I knew I could count on you! Readers Vinay and Flash Gordon both came up with elegant solutions that allowed me to add river of news functionality to the site. I also have added links to Twitter and Facebook pages for the blogs I could find there. Thanks, guys!
That’s cool, Geoff. I’d never really played around with Yahoo Pipes before, but turns out it’s pretty easy to use, and just about the perfect tool to create the “River of News”. Here’s an early attempt (with only a few blogs so far). You can get it as an RSS Feed, and then publish it directly onto PadreBlogs.com, or people can subscribe to that feed in their readers or what-not.
Now, what would be *really* cool would be to interpret the tag data of all the blogs, and be able to filter all content across blogs by tag. For example, I could filter by “Blanks” to get all posts tagged as “Blanks”; it’d take some work as people have different tagging schemes. But that’d be pretty fun. Maybe I can do it using search filters rather than tags.