Sky's Blog

I’ve been looking for this like the holy grail for about a year now, and it’s not really in production yet, but I can see that it will rapidly become very popular. Yahoo has introduced a new service, Yahoo Pipes, that allows us to visually select and combine any number of blog RSS feeds, filter their contents, sort them, and then output those combined feeds as a single feed. This combined feed can then be used by anybody for any purpose. (Well, the terms of service may restrict it to non-commercial, so read them carefully.)

I’ve already been doing much of my real-time feed-reading and mashing using some Gecko Tribe products by Antone Roundy. CaRP and Grouper are the products I’ve been using. And Feedburner also does some of what Pipes does. But these tools don’t really allow me to intermix the feeds in chronological order. So that’s where, in my opinion, Pipes will really excel.

Yahoo Pipes provides an easy-to-use on-screen visual interface that can be used to easily combine feed sources and juggle them to product a nicely-mashed output feed. [read on...]

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Following up on my post about the decision whether to use free software or not, this MacWorld article Blogger bugs bug bloggers- Bloggers frustrated by Blogger bugs, Google says it will get better describes the woes of those using Blogger’s free online hosting following a recent upgrade of the software. It’s upsetting to base any portion of your business on a service and have it come crashing down, but probably even more upsetting if you base it on a free service like Blogger and then have it come crashing down.

Google/Blogger says the problem affect relatively few people, but there are obviously many people who use the service as part of their commercial activities, and these people are in real deep trouble.

I avoid this by hosting my blogs on servers that I own, and I only upgrade software after making a trial installation or two and I test it at least a few days if not a week before I deploy it to other sites. (I maintain 15 WordPress sites at the moment and have two servers in operation, so this isn’t the solution for everybody.)

To help conceptualize where the “rubber meets the road” when it comes to creating your blog – and help you sort out the blogging tools that I’ve been discussing in the last few posts, I put together some diagrams.

These diagrams and their explanations may help you understand the three methods I’ve been discussing for posting to your blog…

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I am known among my friends for reserving my weekends for biking and things other than “work.” My regular job during the week contains a large proportion of volunteer [read free] work, and most people do their volunteer work on the weekend, so sometimes it’s hard for folks to understand my pattern.

I usually put the bike on the car and go to a favorite trailhead – because riding from the house down 800 feet of elevation is fine, but at the end of a day of biking it can be a real drag climbing the 800 feet back up Twin Peaks to the neighborhood…) Imagine my surprise after loading the bike on the roof of the car and starting down the block when I reach the corner and find several dozen gawkers looking out at the bay. Usually this kind of behavior is related to Fleet Week when the Blue Angels thunder around in our skies. It’s not fleet week.

I continue across town toward the bay, where I frequently start my bike trips, and traffic gets heavier and heavier as I go. Not great. So I park the car, unload the bike and continue on two wheels rather than four.

As I approach San Francisco Bay the shore is crowded with thousands of people. This is unusual…

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