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Tim Hoeck

by Tim Hoeck

The Beginners Guide to Yahoo Pipes: Part 1September 13

Recently, I have begun using Yahoo Pipes to quickly grab data from the web. Yahoo Pipes is a service designed to take in data from the web and manipulate it. Typically, data from the web is retrieved through RSS feeds. If you already use RSS feeds, you may find interest in Yahoo Pipes - but if you attempted to use it, you probably took one look and ran away. My goal is to show you how easy and useful Pipes can be!

An Introduction

Yahoo Pipes allows you to take data from multiple sources on the web (typically from RSS feeds) and manipulate it - you can merge (mash) data together, split data up, get more details, or get less details. You get to pick and choose what is displayed in the end result, a finalized feed.

The possibilities are endless - you can use this for lifestreaming - a combined aggregated feed of all your online activity. You could generate a “master” feed, that has all of your favorite news in one location. Or you can take some of that data - and do something with it.

A little background

If you are not a “Unix geek”, the term pipes might sound odd. From the Unix command line, the idea of “piping” data from one command to anot

Prevent a Disaster! A Remote Backup Service ShowdownAugust 13

How much data do you have on your computer? Is it important to you - no, is it irreplaceable? So much of our data is stored on our computers nowadays, yet so many do not have a plan in place in case of emergencies. Maybe you, like me, have all your data on a separate drive. Maybe you even have it on an external drive. What would happen if you turned on your computer today, to find out that the hard drive has failed?

This very thing happened to me just two weeks ago. For me, it was one of my “backup” drives. I have two secondary 120GB internal drives that I store all my non-system data on. One drive is for miscellaneous files (games, some software, random stuff I would need if I reformatted); it would be a moderate headache to get these files back.

The other drive contains my music collection (also recoverable with painstaking work), along with ALL of my IRREPLACEABLE files - including digital photos and videos from the last 7 or so years, software I have written, custom web sites and images that I have created for a number of projects - all unrecoverable data should something go wrong.

Truth is, this isn’t the first time this has happened. The last time, it turned out to be the not-so-important drive. Did I learn my lesson? Not really. Oh sure, I do the occasional copy and paste files to another location. I probably uploaded some photos somewhere, or e-mailed them in the past. But 90% of the UNRECOVERABLE data is not backed up some place safe.

The One Week Diigo ChallengeJune 23

I have recently been on the lookout for a new social bookmarking website. I have used del.icio.us before - a few times in fact, only to find that it was lacking features that I needed. I kept trying because, well, that is what everyone was using. Why should I go elsewhere?

I recently stumbled upon (no, not that way) Diigo, and some of its features caught my eye. I have spent approximately one week using the service, and now I am hooked.

What is Diigo?

Diigo is an online social bookmarking site, similar to del.icio.us or ma.gnolia. It allows you to store all your bookmarks online, tag them, make comments, and share them with other people.

Why not del.icio.us?

The first question that everyone wants to know is, why not del.icio.us? del.icio.us is the de facto standard when it comes to social bookmarking. I wondered why everyone - even myself - was using the ‘Everyone else is doing it’ argument. I had the need for a social bookmarking site, and I have tried del.icio.us a number of times. It never seemed to work out.

New FriendFeed Yahoo PipesJune 11

I have two more Yahoo Pipes up and running for FriendFeed stats. The first will show you who you have commented on the most. The second shows who you liked the most. These are basically the same statistics in the Friend Settings Stats page, but keep in mind this is in the past 300 entries (max). You might find something interesting that the Stats page doesn’t pick up on. Oh yah, you can also see other peoples stats too!