Lisp Blogs | Yahoo Pipes | Lisp Mashup
Friday, May 4, 2007
Zach does a good job of ensuring that most Lisp-related content
shows up in
Planet Lisp. However, not all blogs are primarily about Lisp and a
lot of people don't provide topic-specific RSS feeds for their blogs
so that you can read just certain specific content. Also, what shows up on PL
is determined by Zach, so there may be a number of
blogs that don't show up on Planet Lisp that have some Lisp content
that you would like to read. Big deal, you might think -
just subscribe to those feeds separately with your RSS
reader. However, not all RSS feeders support feed filtering (you might
not want to read the non-lisp content of some blogs) and not everybody
uses the same machine all the time so it isn't always possible to
"carry around" your Lisp-related blogroll with you. (before I get
deluged with emails: yes, I know that you could use an online service such as
Google Reader, but just work with me on this one, ok ;-))
So, I thought this might be a good opportunity to play around with
Yahoo Pipes and create a mashup of various lisp feeds!
The Yahoo Pipes site describes the utility:
"Pipes is a free online service that lets you remix popular feed types and create data mashups using a visual editor. You can use Pipes to run your own web projects, or publish and share your own web services without ever having to write a line of code."Essentially, it attempts to adapt the concept of Unix pipes to XML data manipulation over the Internet. I once created a utility for piping XML through a series of XSLT transforms, so was quite interested in having a look at what Yahoo had come up with. So, I created a pipe that merges all of the content from the Planet Lisp feed with any content that contains the word "lisp" in the feeds of Reddit, Lemonodor, Lambda the Ultimate, and Bluish Coder. This produces output in the form of an RSS feed that you can either view in your browser (if your browser supports RSS feed display) or in an RSS reader. Here is what the design of the pipe looks like:
If you want to play around with a copy of the pipe (you have to have a free Yahoo account for this), you can get it from here. If you just want to view the output of the pipe (you don't need a Yahoo account for this), you can get it from here.
And, if your Lisp interests include non-CL dialects of Lisp as well, you might want to use a variation on this pipe that also merges in content that is specific to Scheme and Emacs:
This pipe adds in content from Planet Scheme and Planet Emacsen to the CL blog feeds. You can get a copy of the Lisp/Scheme/Emacs pipe from here. If you just want to view the output of the pipe, you can get it from here.
