My wife is arguably my biggest fan, although my mom probably deserves "honorable mention."
If you too are a fanboy or fangirl of someone, like, say Robert Scoble, you may want to know what he's blogging about, pod/vod-casting about, Twittering about, etc. Someone put together this great aggregator called Robert Scoble's Temple of Ego.
I thought, wouldn't it be great if we all had our own Temples of Ego?
Back to my wife. Despite her self-professed fanhood, she's been having trouble lately (well, okay, ever) keeping up with all my web activity. This all stems from the fact that Feedhaus, a site I built and launched last fall, was selected as a SXSW Web Award finalist and I've been blathering about this fact in every online setting imaginable, including here on dev2dev. (Please vote for us, BTW.)
So, with upwards of five different blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader shared items, flickr, YouTube and del.icio.us -- keeping track of my enormous ego is a formidable task.
But now, with the power of the semantic web and a great tool called Yahoo! Pipes, you can create your own Temple of Ego in five minutes.
Here's mine.
Simply go to Yahoo! Pipes, log in and create a pipe. In the "Fetch Feed" node at the top, simply enter the RSS or ATOM feed from whatever you want to include in your Temple of Ego. For example, I included all my blogs, my tweets (from Twitter), my Facebook posted items, my Google Reader Shared Items, my del.icio.us links, my flickr photos and my YouTube videos. That's a good start.
Now, drag in a "Sort" node and sort by descending pubDate. This puts all the newest stuff first, known to geeks as "reverse chronological order."
Finally, wire together the Fetch Feed node with the Sort node and then the Sort node with the Pipe Output node.
Now, if you're really egotistical, you can email all your friends a link to your Temple of Ego and encourage them to add the pipe's outbound RSS to their feed reader of choice. (Here's mine.)
So, what on earth does this have to do with ALUI?
ALI 6.5 -- which the good folks at bdg are using to build social applications for Participate.08 -- has some pretty slick RSS capabilities and some really beautiful user profile pages. Imagine if everyone's profile page had the output from their Temple of Ego embedded in it. How powerful would that be? And, with ALI 6.5 and a little Yahoo! Pipes magic, setting this up in your ALI deployment will be a breeze.
Comments
Comments are listed in date ascending order (oldest first)
- Thanks for helping me keep the title of "your biggest fan" -- your Pipe implementation is working beautifully.
Posted by: allisonbucchere on February 13, 2008 at 1:17 PM
- this reminds me of a similar feature on google reader that lets you create a public feed based on your tags. so i could tag multiple feeds with the same tag. then if i make that tag public, it results in a feed that combines all feeds with that tag. pipes looks to be a little more powerful with respect to sorting, etc, but if you don't need that, reader offers a little bit of the same. james
Posted by: jbayer on February 13, 2008 at 5:17 PM