I spent some time this morning tinkering with Pipes. It’s a new feature from Yahoo, something I’d have expected from Google, given that they love to dream up neat things for us all.
Pipes lets you play with data, by filtering it and parsing it. And it outputs it as either a fancy search engine result or, better yet, an RSS feed, so that you continually get updates as new things are added to the web.
Great idea. Interesting execution — there’s minimal documentation, and you’re left to just sort of figure it out. Which is fine — I excel at that.
I started off with this. It’s an RSS feed that gives you results related to my wife, based on her domain (I used kristinlaflamme instead of kristinlaflamme.com), and the two main variants of how to spell her name (Kristin LaFlamme and Kristin La Flamme).
I then turned around and tinkered some more, and made Kristin La Flamme 2.0 2.1, which includes kristen variants and some other, well, goodies. There’s an RSS feed for it, here, and includes some efforts to filter out what Kristin has been doing with Paul and Jafar, her other husbands (or, men that Yahoo claims she is married to).
Why? Well, for starters, K and I are worried about people wholesale ripping off her ideas. The content of her website, with some exceptions, is not just copyrighted, but licensed under one of the variants of the Creative Commons license. Folks are free to use her work, provided they:
- attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.
- not use this work for commercial purposes
- not alter, transform, or build upon this work
So, how do you know? Well, K has been doing the periodic Google search on herself (it’s how she found out she was in Forbes magazine, for example). But really, there has to be a better way.
And, after all, I’m here to make her life easier. This “pipe” should give her an RSS feed which should show her updates to her “web presence” in real time.
What I don’t know, but am curious to see, if if this “pipe” will pick up on comments she leaves on other web sites. I am assuming it will.
I do know that it says a lot about the influence my wife has on other outs there in that big, wide world. The Quilt Epiphany Blog thinks that there are just three other web sites out there that are world reading, with K’s being one of them — who knew?
One thing. Pipes, being from Yahoo, does not seem to like Google. Imagine that. I want to be able to pull from multiple search engines, merge them together, and then filter out duplicates. Should be do-able. Should.
So, rock on. Embrace your Kristin-ness.
