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Twitter badge without @replies January 13, 2009

Posted by Steve Boneham in : Twitter, HowTo, social media, RSS , 16comments

I’m a recent convert to Twitter and was looking for a way to display my tweets elsewhere on the web - such as on the sidebar of this blog. However, I wasn’t happy with the standard Twitter badge, which mixes tweets on ‘What I’m doing’ with ‘@replies’ intended for individuals. Don’t get me wrong, I value @replies, I just didn’t want them on my badge. If you don’t either, here’s how to filter them out with Yahoo Pipes.

Shortcut: copy the pipe

If you don’t want to spend time building your own pipe, all you need to do is create an account, copy the pipe and point it at your twitterstream.

How it works

I used Pipes as it provides a simple way to manipulate RSS feeds. If you want to know more about how this works, read on.

In the Twitter RSS feed, each item is prefixed with your username. That’s useful when you’re mixed in with tweets from other Twitter users, but in a badge where all the tweets are from you, it’s a bit redundant. So we’ll strip that out too.If you ‘re familiar with pipes, then the screenshot below shows you what you’re after. The notes following this give more detailed instructions.

twitter pipe

Creating the pipe

You should now see a preview of your filtered twitterfeed at the bottom of the Pipes window. This should not contain any of your @replies and your username should have been removed too.

Using the pipe

You can now use this feed to create your Twitter badge as follows:

Credits

This pipe is a simplified version of the Twitter Feed without Replies pipe created by Emil S

Put that in your Yahoo pipe and smoke it! November 26, 2008

Posted by Steve Boneham in : HowTo, projects, RSS, JISC , 1 comment so far

IRET Pipe

I’m no web programmer (I don’t even have a beard), but I do appreciate the clever things they do that with a little hacking can make me look clever too! From JavaScript libraries to netvibes widgets and open-source Flash video players, you can go a long way without really programming. But when recently I needed to aggregate some RSS feeds, then filter, truncate and modify them, I thought I was in for some long nights of coding. That’s until I found out how easy this stuff is with Yahoo Pipes.

Pipes lets you mashup and manipulate web content through a simple graphical interface. So rather than writing lines of code, you simply drag & drop blocks from a code library and change a few parameters [see image above or view the pipe].

Pipes has been around a while, but the first time I found a need to use it in anger was for the JISC-IRET support project I’m working on. We needed a way to syndicate content from each of the project blogs to a portal we were building on Netvibes. It’s easy to add each blog feed individually, but we felt that a ‘latest from the projects’ block would be good for the homepage and blog sidebars.

To create this, what we needed to do was:

It was surprisingly easy to apply this logic in Pipes. Most of the blocks are self-explanatory. For example, ‘FetchFeed’ fetches a feed, ‘Truncate feed after’ truncates after a set number of posts - you get the idea. The only complicated block was Regex, which takes the title of a post as a string and appends the name of the blog to it.

Once you’ve designed your pipe, publishing it creates a public web  page with an RSS feed which you can then syndicate elsewhere - such as to the JISC-IRET blog and JISC-IRET portal.

I’m sure some of my more bearded friends will view this crude attempt at web programming with disdain, but perhaps what they should be moer worried about is that services such as Yahoo Pipes might just turn some ordinary web users into wanabee programmers who can do things for themselves.