Ignite Portland was featured in the Oregonian resulting in mayhem, overcrowding, and a new LoT policy of no mainstream media coverage prior to events like Ignite and BarCampPortland.
I took my mom on a vacation to Maui where we spent time lounging on the beach and drinking fruity drinks out of pineapples.
I joined Portland-based startup, Shizzow, to manage the Shizzow community (as a side project, since we are currently bootstrapping). We were also honored to be guests on the Strange Love Live podcast.
Continue to help organize more awesome events in Portland.
Finish my eBook about Companies and Online Communities.
Learn more about Yahoo Pipes.
Continue mission #GetOffButt to get healthier, stronger, and in better shape.
Again, I want to do something spectacular enough that it prompts someone to write a Wikipedia article for me.
Another thing I’m excited about for 2009
The Portland tech community. I rave about it almost constantly, but I do expect the Portland tech community to continue to produce exciting new companies, projects, and community organized events to become even stronger in 2009.
This video shows how to get input from a list of items in a CSV file, and it introduces the loop module. A CSV file is a great choice when you want to fetch a bunch of feeds and change them frequently without having to update your pipe. If you haven’t already watched the 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Introductory Demo, I strongly suggest that you watch it. This demo builds on the basic structure developed in the introductory demo. The CSV file I’m using also contains the same feeds from ReadWriteWeb and GigaOM that we used in the original demo plus a few others.
You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (22 MB) to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version above.
Fetch CSV Module. Enter the URL of the CSV file (make sure that it already exists in a publicly accessible location) along with information about column names and separation characters as needed.
Loop module with Fetch Feed. Loops through each element in the CSV file and fetches the feed associated with the item.
Filter Module. Filter by a couple of keywords.
Sort Module. Sort by date in descending order to make sure things are sorted in a logical manner.
Pipe Output. The final module in every Yahoo Pipe.
I wanted to have a way to find all of the comments posted on any of my WebWorkerDaily posts, but I couldn’t find an easy way to do it in Wordpress (I don’t have access to plugins, since it isn’t my blog). As always, I turned to Yahoo Pipes for the solution, and I made it customizable so that others could use my pipe. Since I wrote this pipe for my use, it supports the configuration I needed, and I also tested it on TechCrunch, Mashable, and GigaOM. However, there were quite a few multi-user blogs where it does not work, so please pay close attention to the caveats below before using my new Comments for One Author on Multi-Author Wordpress Blog pipe.
Caveats:
Works only with Wordpress Blogs
Works only with blogs using Feedburner
Will not work under non-standard URL / feed formats
I suspect that the Wordpress / Feedburner combo is probably the most common configuration for multi-user blogs, so it should work for many blogs. However, if you aren’t using the configuration supported by this pipe, you should be able to clone the pipe and tweak it pretty easily to use other formats.
Many of you already noticed that I have started blogging on GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily site. Thank you so much for all of the congratulations, well wishes, comments, and more. The plan is to post an article or two a week on a freelance basis. I even got a head start before I left, so I have a couple more posts in the WebWorkerDaily publish queue that should go out sometime next week.
My first post was about making productive use of my holiday time, and I am happy to say that I am off to a good start. I’m posting this from the Chicago airport (where my flight has been delayed), but at least I managed to edit and encode 2 more 2 minute Yahoo Pipes demos during my last flight, but you will have to wait to see them until I post the next one on December 29th.
I’ll also be mostly off the grid until December 27th. I’ll be in rural Ohio hanging out with family and playing scrabble, but my internet connection will be pretty spotty during the trip. They have dial up access (no DSL or cable on the farm), and even my EVDO access is painfully slow. In other words, you could be kind to my inbox and wait to email me until after the 27th *hint, hint*.
People often ask about my favorite technology blogs and podcasts, and I was inspired by the recent ReadWriteWeb post on a similar topic to do a post with a few of my favorites. These are in no particular order.
Wow, it was hard to pick my favorites. Limiting to technology helped, since I could leave all of the NPR podcasts (love Science Friday), NYT, etc. The blogs were really hard, since I could choose from the 250 feeds in my reader.
ReadWriteWeb’s Jobwire site has been keeping up with who is being hired, while many other sites are focused on layoffs and the downturn. It’s exciting to see them publish their numbers showing that people are still hiring community managers and social media specialists.
I’ve been seeing a similar trend anecdotaly, and so far at least, I’m still getting clients who want me to consult with them to help build online communities, new blogs, or improve their social media presence.
They have some other data available in their full post, which you should take the time to read. It’s just nice to see a little good news about people getting jobs now and then.
The debugger serves a couple of functions in Yahoo Pipes. The first one is pretty obvious – debugging. It allows you to see exactly what is happening in each component of your Yahoo Pipe to help with the debugging process when something isn’t working quite right.
The debugger also serves a less obvious purpose. You can use it to learn more about the elements of the rss feeds that you are using as input. For most blogs, the rss feeds are fairly standard, but other services store all kinds of useful information in their rss feeds in addition to standard elements like link, title, and date. The debugger can help you find this additional information in the feed.
Using The Debugger: 2 Minute Yahoo Pipes Video Demo
You can watch the embedded video above, but I recommend downloading the higher resolution Quicktime file (19 MB) to watch. The quality will be much better than the flash version above.
Consulting services focused on helping your company get real business value out of participating in online communities.
Interests include online communities, open technologies, open source, web 2.0, social media, RSS, Yahoo Pipes, blogging, podcasting, and innovation.
The opinions expressed in this blog are mine alone.
About Dawn
Contact Info & vCard: Dawn Foster Consultant, Community Manager, Event Organizer, Blogger, Podcaster, Vegan, and Technology Enthusiast Fast Wonder LLC dawn@fastwonder.com cell: 503-702-7223
Add to Address Book
Blog RSS Feed (recommended)
Yahoo Pipes Video Podcast on iTunes
Subscribe to Fast Wonder by Email
OpenID at ClaimID
