HEA Centre for Bioscience OER Project Blog

As an interesting aside, we’ve been looking at ways of collating and sharing blog outputs from and for our project partners (and any other interested parties of course).

Terry suggested having a look at Pipes, a web app run by Yahoo. To quote the site, “Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.”

It’s free to use, but you do need to register a Yahoo account. Once you’re signed in you are presented with a simple graphical interface with which to create your pipeline. You can see mine below.

The Fetch Feed box points at the RSS feeds of all the currently active blogs, and then simply outputs them through the Sort box, where they’re arranged by date, newest first, and then sent to the Pipe Output.

I could’ve additionally filtered the feeds using ukoer category type or similar, but as I’m expecting all output from these blogs to be OER-related I didn’t think it was necessary.

You can check out the fruits of my labour half way down our main OER page, here.

This relatively simple piece of script was used to embed the Pipe into the webpage:

<script src=”http://l.yimg.com/a/i/us/pps/listbadge_1.1.js”>{“pipe_id”:”fc4bf3f89f16474cacbb5b279380a3bb”,”_btype”:”list”}
</script>

The naked pipe output can also be viewed here, where you have a number of further options to output the pipe as RSS, add it to your Netvibes/iGoogle etc.

Fin.

Filed under: general, ukoer, YahooPipes