Keeping up with Tech Field Days using Yahoo Pipes!
If you don’t know about the GestaltIT Tech Field Days, they are great! I was privileged to attend the first 2 (Tech Field Day San Jose & Tech Field Day Boston) and can’t say enough great things about them. Due to their overwhelming success, Stephen Foskett (Organizer) has planned even more of them! In the true community spirit of the Field Days, different sets of bloggers will be attending the various events. All of them will be blogging and posting their thoughts on what they see and learn. It was becoming a challenge to track down and read all the various blog posts related to the TFD’s and will no doubt become harder in the future. Enter Web 2.0! 🙂 Yahoo Pipes and Google Reader have made keeping up with the Tech Field Day crew(s) pretty darn easy!
Step 1 was to create a folder in Google Reader and create a public RSS feed for it. As new Bloggers attend the various TFDs, I subscribe to their RSS feeds and place them in this Google Reader Group.
Step 2 was to create a pipe [No longer Valid] to parse through the massive TFD Google Reader Group feed and pick out Tech Field Day related posts.
1) Pull in the Google Reader Group Feed.
2) Look at ONLY the last 30 days of Posts from it.
3) Filter IN anything with a Category, Description or Title with GestaltIT or Tech Field Day in it.
4) Remove duplicates of course.
5) Remove some more duplicates.
6) Sort the new feed by Date (Newest first)
7) Grab only the last 50 posts (Which typically covers them all).
The resulting feed is pushed through FeedBurner for some additional cleanup and the final product can be subscribed to HERE.
Step 3 – Enjoy the opinions, views, pictures and comments of your favorite GestaltIT Tech Field Day independent bloggers. 🙂
Additionally, I also import this cleaned up RSS feed into a page for the Facebook Crowd. Check it out at https://www.facebook.com/GestaltIT
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p align=”left”>So in a nutshell, You can Join the Facebook Group here : https://www.facebook.com/GestaltIT or Subscribe via RSS here : https://feeds.feedburner.com/GestaltitTFD?format=xml