Using Feed Informer as a Feed Mashup tool

Feed Informer is a bit easier to use than Yahoo! Pipes. Yahoo! Pipes has a wide variety of other uses, so its learning curve is a bit higher, while Feed Informer’s main purpose is to do feed mashups.

Feed Informer lets you select the feeds you want to display, and again gives you code that you can place in a website of your choosing. 

Here and here are pages with a mashup of the “psychology” and “tools” feeds, combined with the news feed from UB’s Langsdale Library, just to show an example of how feeds from this blog could be customized.

Another sample post

So here is a pretend post related to business information.

To wit: The global economy is going in the tank!  Businesses are closing, people are loosing their jobs, investors are lossing their net worth!  It’s time to panic.  What more do you need to know?

So this can be categorized under business, just so people can see how it is hidden from the psychology category.

Ain’t the internet grand.

A sample topic post

This is just a placeholder to experiment with using topics to generate specific subject specific feeds within the same blog.  If this post was related to psychology, for example, and everyone agreed to use the same psychology tags on all of their posts, than everyone working on the cooperative blogging project could use the same blog, and people would have the option to subscribing the the feed for the entire blog or for just posts tagged with the subject(s) of their choice.

This would give people posting the option of posting something to more than one category.  The other option is to maintain separate blogs for each subject, but I like the combined blog better.

Using Yahoo! pipes for feed mashup

This is partially informational and partly as a way of providing content to get this blog started. One of the ways I think this blog might be used (if it gets off the ground) is to have people combine the feed from a subject related blog with a feed from a blog from their own library and then put the combined feed on a subject guide or a class page.

As an example, I used Yahoo! pipes to combine a feed frm this blog with one from my library. Headlines from this feed mashup, such as it is, are over there on the right.

Yahoo! pipes also provides a “get this badge” link which, among other things, gives this line of javascript that can be pasted into a website to get the content of the RSS feeds to appear. It should even work in most courseware pages, if a professor agrees to put the code in an online classroom.

Here is an example of library course page where this javascript code:

<script src=”http://pipes.yahoo.com/js/listbadge.js”>{“pipe_id”:”3vSIJn8Z3hGq2L5aPxJ3AQ”,”_btype”:”list”}</script>

(along with some CSS) was  pasted in towards the top.  This enables the headlines from a combined feed to display within another page.

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