|
|
All You Need is Pipes
Ever since Yahoo! Pipes started offering output in serialized PHP it's been possible to paste pipe elements along with whatever HTML tags are desired directly into a web page, using only a few lines of very simple PHP code.All you need is Y! Pipes. No additional, huge, complex, difficult to configure script is necessary. While an experienced PHP programmer could probably whip up the code to convert Pipe PHP to HTML in a few minutes, for an amateur blogger who is trying to, for example, publish an omni-feed, or spruce up a static home page with a blog feed, it'll take a couple thousand Google searches, message board questions, and a lot of trial and error—which is how I finally got the omni feed and latest photo feed on russ-stein.com working.
On the other hand, for just $5 you can use the simple, clean PHP I wrote to power my home page. Once you've played around with the code and see how it works you should be able to tweak it for whatever you're trying to do, assuming you're at least somewhat HTML savvy. In fact I think someone with better web design skills than mine could create a really killer site using this method.
Photos!
One thing I'm really stoked about is posting pics directly to my site from my cell phone, via Pipes. Ever since I set this up I keep thinking that one day I'll have a youtube moment/witness something newsworthy and upload the photo to Twitpic, but since my photo account feeds are piped to my home page, my site would get the hits too.As far as I know, right now the photo applications offering mobile uploading are Twitpic and Flickr. For my site I've only configured Twitpic, but I see no reason it wouldn't work with Flickr's RSS, assuming Flickr allows off site image display.
Publish an Omni-feed
In my opinion Y! Pipes is the best tool out there for collecting and merging all of your online activity into a single, simple feed for your website. It is simply the best ego feed aggregator on the net, allowing you to collect all your Internet activities in one place—Twitter updates, eBay auctions, Craigslist posts, Amazon reviews, Youtube videos, blog posts, or basically anything you do in an online account that has an RSS feed. (Free up the RSS, Facebook!)Support
I can provide some limited support for modifying the code for your site via Skype chat, within reason. The key thing to keep in mind, however, is that except for printing stuff from the feed to your page you should try to do everything you can within Pipes. Think of Y! Pipes as like a souped up PHP engine, if that's a concept you're comfortable with. Everything necessary to prepare content for publication on your site, e.g. limiting title and excerpt lengths, formatting dates, renaming stuff, selecting comment IDs, &c. should be done within Pipes before you get too involved with writing complex PHP for your own page. When I first started I didn't really get this concept and I ended up with a huge mess of code on my site that seemed clever at the time but turned out to be totally unnecessary because Pipes already has functions for everything I was trying to do.Feel free to clone my pipes for an example to work with. My pipes have been vetted by some of the amazing programming geniuses who hang around on the Pipes developer help message board, so they're in pretty good shape.
The reason I'm doing this is because I think omni feeds are cool and I want to see more of them, and I want to see people getting creative with them. There's a lot of cool potential uses for them. I would think that, for example, for a professional blogger, an omni feed would be a much cooler, more immediate, and easier way to collect and promote posts than a weekly roundup post on a personal blog or whatever.I wouldn't even post this ad if I hadn't been publishing my own omni feed on my homepage for a while and didn't have some nice clean code with a few elegant solutions to some of the problems presented by publishing a pipe in html, like the right "foreach" format for printing a whole feed rather than having to select each item individually, or the trick to conditional treatment of feed items, allowing different items to be treated differently—meaning, for example, printing comment code for one type of item and thumbnail images for another.
Finally, this script uses cURL, because file_get_contents/fopen is disabled at my host, but it can be easily modified to use fopen if that's what you want to do and your host allows it.
publishing pipe output in html hosted by russellstein.
Chat about what's on your mind. More about public chats.