Pipes and Netscape: Historyscape for Geeks

Following Alan’s experiment with Yahoo! Pipes I thought I’d have a quick play and see if anything interesting could be done with it. What I’ve done is aggregate Netscape feeds to produce something like an historical / archaeological version of Digg. You can do this with Pligg, but the advantage of hooking into Netscape’s API is that you already have people voting without having to promote or maintain the scripts. The headlines should be quite interesting from the start.

The wonderful thing about Netscape is that each tag has its own feed, so you can subscribe to feeds for history stories and archaeology stories. However if you’re interested in history AND archaeology then I can’t see a way to combine the stories into one useful feed on site – hence Pipes. Initially Pipes looks nothing special. You can import feeds and mix them, but you can do the same with things like Feedjumbler, and a lot more easily too. Where Pipes gets more interesting is that it’s a fairly easy way to start messing around in a more complex way with feeds. In this case the Netscape feeds have a votecount attribute. Mix the feeds together and it’s very easy to order them by votecount descending, meaning that you have the most popular stories at the top of the feed. Regex means I can chop out bits of the description I don’t want, like the links to the channel and tags, which look confusing. I can also fiddle with other parts of the feed link including a tally of the votes in the title.

The next bit is searching Flickr for photos which might be related to the story. The pipe finds six and adds them to the end of the description.

You can see the result of all this mucking about at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=8BPCEGAn3BGO1aM7JhOy0Q and at http://clioaudio.com/toys/historyscape. And below. The headlines below are called using a Javascript which means that anyone could put them on their website by including a simple line of code. I’m not making this public yet though as the writing is very inefficent. Basically if my site is down your site becomes inaccessible if you put this script on it. Not a problem for me, but it could be for you. I’ll try and find a way of re-writing in a more 2.0 style.

Anyway the demonstration is below:

The really helpful thing is that you can examine the source of other people’s pipes, which is handy for seeing how to make your own, so you’re more than welcome to peer at the source of mine to make your own feeds.

The lite version of this post is here.