The Real-Time Web – Indeed!

Unbelievable how much time it takes to keep a “live” blog functioning properly when you’re working with new software.

It’s after 1:00am and I’ve just finished wrestling with the day’s blog entries. Reformatting them to make them look better, and making sure that the feeds of more than a dozen geeks are coming in and being handled properly. (And here and there a little bit of editorial work.)

I’m afraid this is what is known as the Real-time web. [See LeWeb]Yahoo Pipes still saves me a zillion hours almost every day. I’m still monitoring 18 geek blogs in close-to-real-time and when a post is written that falls within certain limits, it has to be published. And it has to be published as close to real-time as possible. I have to review about half of these feeds and then approve the posts, but most are on “automatic” and the post is published on Traveling Geeks right away.

Yahoo Pipes is used in two ways in this environment:

First, for some of the geeks it monitors two or three blogs and mashes them together into a single feed, which is then examined, filtered, and goes to Traveling Geeks for possible publication.

Second, in some cases it takes the output of a Typepad blog (which produces a different type of feed/output) and massages it so it can be properly evaluated and processed by the WordPress software which lies under Traveling Geeks.

Without it, I would have been up until after 1:00am tonight.