Well, the cat’s out the bag already. Within hours John Bolch picked up on a FamilyLawPipe I created yesterday with Yahoo Pipes.
For those of you who need an introduction, Yahoo Pipes is a service from Yahoo which enables you to take inputs from RSS feeds and other XML etc files, manipulate them (eg sort, filter, truncate etc) and then output the result as an RSS feed or other format – all using a neat drag and drop interface.
So, in this case, the FamilyLawPipe takes 13 family law blog feeds, sorts their entries by date and outputs the latest 50 to a single feed.
Nice idea Nick. Something other lawyers here in the States out to pick up on. Being a mini tickertape on a niche subject via feeds is not only a nice resource for others, but lets others know your expertise by virtue of you following the subject.
Way to go Nick! Same strategy as I used with legalpubs.ca. Only difference is that I’m running the rss from the pipe into feedburner, and then re-publishing on a new domain.
But then, you already knew that. :)
Love the initiative, and will blog it. Are you planning on dedicated website to watch the stream? Let me know if I can help in any way.
I can see the door opening for more feed streams. you?
Hi Nick! Good to see you picking up on this. Yahoo! Pipes is an outstanding tool isn’t it. I use it to strip feed item descriptions and add suffixes to certain incoming feed items (i.e., feeds from certain third parties) which are parsed onto InsideoutLegal (http://www.insideoutlegal.co.nz). You could do the same thing with your family law pipe if you wished. Happy New Year. Richard.
Hi again Nick
Just took a look at your pipe. Great stuff. If you wish, you could improve it by setting up some modules that would enable each feed item title in your output feed to automatically display the source/author of the incoming item. That way there’s no confusion as to who has written what post. You need to use the regex and rename modules to achieve this. Happy to help if you wish. I could send you an image of the set-up I’ve worked out to do this. Cheers.
All. Thanks for the encouraging comments. To be honest, the FamilyLawPipe is just the result of 30 minutess experimentation. I had been meaning to give Pipes a go for some time and finally got round to it. I had not intended to publicise it until I’d produced something more useful, but John Bolch discovered it almost immediately and blabbed about it! Yes, it’s just a simple aggregation. When I have more time I’ll refine it, produce more, use them to enhance the infolaw site … whatever. The possibilities are of course endless.