3 posts tagged “pipes”

Everything seems to be a follow-up these days.

It turns out that Pipes (now? always did and I never noticed?) exposes a y:published property, which looks suspiciously like the Perl DateTime object mentioned previously. Having seen that, I've now hammered three of the four feeds I want to aggregate into a single feed.

For the fourth source, Flickr, I need to decide if I'm doing a simple life stream (more on that concept at Jeremy Keith's journal), or something more complex where I can differentiate between a single photo with a narrative or days with many images, in the style of Phil Gyford's home page. Not that I suspect anybody cares much. Doesn't everyone just use RSS these days anyway?

A couple of notes on my previous posts. groupr's had another quick release. Just after cloning it to the live domain last night, I quickly took out the obsolete (and distracting) toggling of group visibility, which Gareth had suggested on Wednesday. Tom persuaded me to clone it across this morning, so there it is. I'm still aiming to fix up the HTML this weekend, if I can get TT style modifiers to work in Trimpath templates.

Tom's also to blame for the other update. Apparently, while playing with Pipes, he observed a stack trace mentioning XML::Feed, the nice Perl module for abstracting RSS and Atom data, which led him to find my observation that there was no nice abstraction even more baffling. Oh well; hopefully that means it'll be easy to fix in a new version.

For the last couple of months I've been sitting on a CGI script that would aggregate all my content for my personal site. Part of the reason is caching: the script doesn't have any, and it turns out that XML::Feed isn't Storable friendly, which knocks out my first approach.

So when I had a think about what Yahoo's Pipes promises, I thought it might be worth a look. I could get the service to do all the heavy lifting, hope they had a sensible caching policy (and if not, well, at least it was Someone Else's Problem), and then just format a single RSS feed locally.

Sadly, there's a major problem. The aforementioned XML::Feed Perl module does a wonderful job of hiding the mess of formats that labour under the acronym RSS and the name Atom. If you want to soft by date, you can do so easily.  (In fact, you get lovely Perl DateTime objects. I can't sing DateTime's praises enough, even if it does look daunting at first.) Pipes, however, doesn't. I can sort my Vox Atom feed by its pubDate property, or my delicious and husk RSS feeds by dc:date, but neither sort has a date format in common, so I can't sort them once they're output.

I had a quick look to see if there was an obvious way of doing a date transformation on an element of an item, but unless I'm missing something it's far from obvious. I could write a small web service and call it, but that's a lot of work, and I might as well do things locally if I'm that bothered. So I've given up, but not before writing this, because it seems like a natural thing to handle in such a high-level environment, and I'm surprised they don't.