Practical 2.0 Design/Tech

Step 1: Pick a community designator

I've been using the community name followed by a dot. The prefix goes in front of category description to make a set of unique tags for the aggregator. When someone wants to add something for the site they tag it with this "community.category" tag. In my example, when someone wants to list a new Quaker blog they use "quaker.blog", "quaker" being the community name, "blog" being the category name for the "New Blogs" page.

Step 2: Collect the community prefix and category name in Pipes

You begin by going into Pipes and pulling over two text inputs: one for the community prefix, the other for the specific category.

Step 3: Construct these into tags

Now use the "String Concatenation" module to turn this into the "community.category" model. The community input goes into the top slot, a dot is the second slot and the category input goes into the last slot.

Now, when you have a tag in Flickr with a dot in it, Flickr automatically removes it in the resultant RSS feed. So with Flickr you want your tag to be "communitycategory" without a dot. Simple enough: just pull another "String Concatenation" module onto your Pipes work space. It should look the same except that it won't have the middle slot with the dot.

Step 4: Turn these tags into RSS URLs

Pull three "URLBuilder" modules into Pipes, one for each of the services we're going to query. For the Base, use the non-tag specific part of the URL that each service uses for its RSS feeds. Here they are:

Under path elements, put the correct tag: for Del.icio.us and Google it should be the community.category tag, for Flickr the dot-less communitycategory tag.

Step 5: Fetch and Dedupe

Fetch is the Pipes module that pulls in URLs and outputs RSS feeds. It can also combine them. Send each URLBuilder output into the same Fetch routine.

Since it's possible that you'll might have duplicate posts, use the "Unique" module to deduplicate entries by URL. Through a little trial and error I've determined that in cases of duplicates, feeds lower in the Fetch list trump those higher. In the actual Pipe powering my aggregator I pull a second Del.icio.us feed: my own. I have that as the last entry in the Fetch list so that I can personally override every other input.

Step 6: Sort by Date

With experimentation it seems like Pipes orders the output entries by descending date, which is probably what you want. But I want to show how Pipes can work with "dc" data, the "Dublin Core" model that allows you to extend standard RSS feeds (see yesterday's post for more on this).

Google Blog Search and Del.icio.us feeds use the "dc:date" field to record the time when the post was made. Flickr uses "dc:date.Taken" to pass on the photograph's metadata about when it was taken. Pipes' "Rename" module lets you copy both fields into one you create (I've simply used "date"), which you can then run through its "Sort" module. Again, it's a moot point since Pipes seems to do this automatically. But it's good to know how to manipulate and rename "dc" data if only because many PHP parsers have trouble laying it out on a webpage.

Update: it's all moot: according to a ZDNet blog, "Pipes now automatically appends a pubDate tag to any RSS feed that has any of the other allowable date tags." This is nice: no need to hack the date every time you want to make a Pipe!

Step 7: Output

The final step for any Pipe is the "Pipe Output" module.

In action

You can see this published Pipe here, and copy and play with it yourself. The result lets you build an RSS feed based on the two inputs.

Step 1: Input tags

The Del.icio.us social bookmarking system runs much of my aggregator: users see a post they like and bookmark it in Del.icio.us with a special tag.

The first step in Pipes is to collect the input (right). Pull the "Text Input" module (above) onto your Pipes work space. This lets you collect user input. Give it both a name and a prompt. In most instances it's fine that these be the same as the prompt won't be visible in the end. It's good to put something down in Debug for later on in the Pipes process.

Step 2: Construct the RSS call

We take our two input tags and use them to construct an URL by using the "URLBuilder". The base URL is Del.icio.us's RSS feed (http://del.icio.us/rss/). The URL builder adds the user input then the tag input to give us a valid URL (http://del.icio.us/rss/user/tag/).

Step 4: Grab the feed

Yahoo Pipes' "Fetch" module takes that URL input and turns it into an RSS feed. Shown to the right is Fetch with the final "Pipe Output".

See it in action

You can see how this fits together by going to my Del.icio.us Sample page on Pipes. You can make a copy and play with it yourself. Add "&user=username&tag=tagname&_render=rss" to that URL and you've made it a feed.

Okay so I've turned a Del.icio.us RSS feed into... a Yahoo Pipes RSS feed with identical input and output. Well, we're only getting started. Our input tags can be reused for other searches and spliced together inside of a more elaborate Pipe. That's where the fun starts and I'll get there soon.

The other advantage of sending things through Pipes is that we can easily rename fields. Del.icio.us, Flickr and other services often extend RSS standards by including metadata in "dc" fields, an abbreviation for the Dublin Core standards extension. A recent entry from my Del.icio.us feed includes this:

     <dc:creator>martin_kelley</dc:creator>
     <dc:date>2007-03-15T05:18:53Z</dc:date>
     <dc:subject>tech tech.design</dc:subject>

Standard PHP parsers like MagpieRSS and SimplePie often have trouble pulling dc data. With Pipes you can rename the fields you like; in theory that should make them more accessible to the parsers. You can also combine fields and use Pipes' Regex module to operate on them with regular expressions.

Just about every native Web 2.0 applications comes built-in with multiple RSS feeds. But in the real world, websites are built using an almost-infinite number of content management systems and web development software programs. Sometimes a single website will use different programs for putting its contents online and sometimes a single organization spreads its functions over multiple domains.

Step 1: Make it Del.icio.us

To begin, sign up with Del.icio.us, the popular "social bookmarking" web service (similar services can be easily adapted to work). Then add a "post to Del.icio.us" button to your browser's toolbar following the instructions here. Now whenever you put new content up on your site, go that new page, click on your "post to Del.icio.us" button and fill out a good title and description. Choose a tag to use. A tag is simply a category and you can make it whatever you want but "mysites" or your business name will be the easiest to remember. Hit save and you've started an RSS feed.

How? Well, Del.icio.us turns each tag into a RSS feed. You can see it in all its machine code glory at del.icio.us/rss/username/mysites (replacing "username" with your username and "mysites" with whatever tag you chose).

Now you could just advertise that Del.icio.us RSS feed to your audience but there are a few problems doing this. One is that Del.icio.us accounts are usually personal. If your webmaster leaves, then your published RSS feed will need to change. Not a good scenario, especially since you won't even be able to tell who's still using that old feed. Before you advertise your feed you should "future proof" it by running it through Feedburner.

Cloak that Feed

Go to Feedburner.com. Right there on the homepage they invite you to type in a URL. Enter your Del.icio.us feed's address and sign up for a Feedburner account. In the field next to feed address give it some sensible name relating to your company or site, let's say "mycompany" for our example. You'll now have a new RSS feed at feeds.feedburner.com/mycompany. Now you're in business: this is the feed you advertise to the world. If you ever need to change the source RSS feed you can do that from within Feedburner and no one need know.

The default title of your Feedburner feed will still show it's Del.icio.us roots (and the webmaster's username). To clear that out, go into Feedburner's "Optimize" tab and turn on the "Title/Description Burner," filling it out with a title and description that better matches your feed's purpose. For an example of all this in action, the Del.icio.us feed that powers my tech link blog and its Feedburner "cloak" can be found here:

• http://del.icio.us/rss/martin_kelley/tech
• http://feeds.feedburner.com/techlinksblog

Get that Feed out there

Under Feedburner's "Publicize" tag there are lots of neat features to republish your feed yourself. First off is the "Chicklet chooser" which will give you that ubiquitous RSS feed icon to let visitors know you've entered the 21st Century. Their "Buzz Boost" feature lets you create a snippet of code for your homepage that will list the latest additions. "Email subscriptions" lets your audience sign up for automatic emails whenever you add something to your site.

Final Thoughts

RSS feeds are great ways of communicating exciting news to your audiences. If you're lucky, important bloggers in your audience will subscribe to your feed and spread your news to their networks. Creating a feed through a bookmarking service allows you to add any page on any site regardless of its underlying structure.

About eighteen months ago I started a "links blog" of interesting Quaker links, incorporated as a sidebar on my popular "QuakerRanter" personal blog. I eventually gave the links their own URL (QuakerQuaker.org) and invited others to join the linking. I always stumble when trying to tell people what QuakerQuaker is all about. The best definition is that its a "collaboratively edited blog aggregator" but that's a horribly tech description.

The rise of blogs is creating the necessity for these sort of theme-based aggregators. This morning I stumbled on Original Signal, a new site that organzes the best Web 2.0 blogs. A site called PopURLs does the same for "the latest web buzz." A site called SolutionWatch has written about these in Tracking the web with Single Page Aggregators. We're all on to something here. I suspect that sometime this fall some clever person will coin a new term for these sites.

It's startling to realize that my three year toddler is almost the same age as Myspace and older than Facebook. In just a few short years they've come to dominate much of the online world, especially with under-25 users. The kind of independent blogs that dominate a sites like Livejournal and Blogspot don't have the web of cross-connections--what I called the "folksonomic density"--of the new social networking sites. It seems appropriate that Myspace was founded by spammers: who knows more about sucking people in?

The question: will the net have room for independent niche sites? Myspace is changing its architecture to disable key linking features of third-party embedded plug-ins like the from the popular video site Youtube. The big search sites also want a piece of this market--new features on Yahoo local and the geotagged maps on Yahoo's Flickr are impressive). It all reminds me some of the debates about local food co-ops versus enlightened supermarkets: is it a good thing that organic produce and soymilk can be purchased at the local Acme, even if that cuts into the independent co-op's business? Don't we want everyone to have access to everything? In the end, philosophy won't settle this argument.

Here's some of what Johnson has to say:

Distribution, content creation, and the ability to more easily compete with established local players online... blogging is perfect for that. I mean a blog is chronologically arranged, in columns, divided by categories and changes (in many cases) everyday. That's the broad definition of a newspaper, right? A blog is so much more than that, but the basic structure lends itself very well to developing an online competitor for newspapers.

It was three years ago that I followed Brad Choate's instructions for using Moveable Type as a whole-site content management system. What started as an experiment became a way of life for me. The MT interface lends itself so well to content management that I'm now using it for my non-techie clients: Quakersong.org and Quakeryouth.org are both put together by MT and I've been surprised that there's been almost no learning curve for the client's adoption of this software.

Given this, it seems odd that the kids at Moveable Type haven't taken MT in this direction (even more surprising since they hired Brad himself a few years ago!). I see a big market in my niche sites for this sort of functionality and three years later I'm still having to tweak templates to get this to work. Anil, what's up? If Drupal had better documentation and smoother installation it would have been the brawn behind MartinKelley.com.

It would be fun to follow Until Monday's example and create a hyperlocal site (hint hint to VW if she's reading this). Of course, locality is not just geographically-based anymore. Quakerquaker.org is a local portal of a different kind. I'm a big believer that the hyperlocality of niche and geographic sites are the cutting edge in the next-wave of the social web.

There's a lot of pioneering to be done in this regards. The net has a lot of power to take down culture monopolies by confronting old boy networks and business-as-usual thinking with innovative social networks that harness the talents of the outsiders. The smart newspapers, magazines, churches and cultural organizations will come on board and leap-frog themselves to twenty-first century relevance. Too many of the Philadelphia (and/or) Quaker institutions I know respond to change by shuffling job titles and putting blinders up against recognizing the ever-narrower demographic they serve.

Syndication feeds are the lingua franca powering all the cool new websites. It doesn't matter what blogging platform you use or what operating system you're on: if your software provides an RSS feed I can mix and match it and use it to pull in content to my site.

Examples 1: Photographs: I email all of my adorable kid pictures to the photo sharing site Flickr, which then provides a syndication feed ("here"). I use a little fancy patch of coding on my website to pull in the information about the latest photos (location, caption, etc) so that I can display them on my homepage. Whenever you go to my Theo age you'll see the latest Flickr photos of him.

Example 2: Bookmarks. I also use the "social bookmarking" system with the odd name of del.icio.us. When I find a page I want to bookmark, I click a Delicious button in my browser, which opens a pop-up window. I write a description, pick a category or two and hit save. Deliciouis then provides an RSS syndication feed which I can use to pull together a list of my latest bookmarks and display it on my website. Wave a few magic wands of complication (pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!) and you have the main trick behind Quakerquaker.org.

I've simplified both examples a bit but you probably get the point. Syndication feeds are the secret behind blog readers like Bloglines and email subscription services like the one's I provide for quakerquaker.org.

New to me is the concepts around the Well-Formed Web. As described by Kevin Donahue "The layman's premise of the Well-Formed Web is that each site will have drill-down feeds - a top level feed, item specific feeds, and so on." What this means is that you don't just have one single RSS feed on a site (your latest ten posts) but RSS feeds on everything. Every category get its own unique feeds (e.g., the last ten posts about web design) and every post gets its own unique feed tracking its comments (e.g., this feed of comments from my "Introducing MartinKelley.com" post). It certainly seems a bit like overkill but computers are doing all the work and the result gives us a multi-dimensionality that we can use to pull all sorts of neat things together.