Tag Archives | Yahoo

Plug Your Yahoo Pipe into FeedBurner

Apr/03 in Online Apps

Yesterday I told you how to create a mega ego feed using Yahoo! Pipes. As I told you then, the RSS feed that it spits out is really ugly. Don’t you wish you could make it something you could at least remember or make easier to type out? Thanks to FeedBurner you can.

Step #1 – Get That Ugly Pipe RSS Feed Address

Yahoo! PipesFirst thing you need to do is get the RSS feed for your pipe you created. You can do that by going to the Yahoo! Pipes Web site, click “my pipes”, click on the name of your pipe, and then clicking on “Run this Pipe”. From there click on “Subscribe” and select the RSS output option (Get as RSS).

If you need an easier method, or you missed a click in there, take this URL and replace “yourpipeid” with the random spew of letters and numbers Yahoo gives you to identify your pipe.

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=yourpipeid&_render=rss

Make sure you have that copied to your clipboard (in Windows higlight it all, right-click and select copy) so you can paste it in our next step.

Step #2 – Plug the Ugly Feed Address Into FeedBurner

FeedBurnerNow that you have your ugly RSS feed in hand, point your browser towards FeedBurner.com. Paste your ugly RSS feed into the text box on FeedBurner’s Web site and click on the “Next” button. From there you will walk through the steps of creating a FeedBurner feed to replace your hideous pipe feed.

What does the final result look like? Well I created an ego feed of my own via Yahoo! Pipes, plugged it into FeedBurner and ended up with the Mega Mitch Feed.

Now from there, you can use FeedBurner to customize the look and feel of your feed and add all kinds of neat functionality to it.

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Create an Ego Feed With Yahoo Pipes

Apr/02 in Online Apps

If you find yourself writing for multiple places and having multiple Web sites, it can become very hard to track everything that you do. Sure you have an RSS feed for this project and and RSS feed for that project, but wouldn’t it be nice to have one super RSS feed – if only for your own egotistical reasons? Gather your RSS feeds and head over to Yahoo! Pipes and I will show you how to get it done.

Create a Pipe!

First thing you need to do is point your browser towards Yahoo! Pipes and click on “Create a Pipe”. After doing that you will see a big confusing interface you can not make heads or tails from. Don’t worry. Just click on “Fetch Feed” and drag it over to your right (onto the grid).

Drag and Drop Fetch Feeds!

Next you will want to click on the “+” graphic next to URL to add more feeds to the list. Click it once for every feed you would like to group together as one.

Sort Your Feed Items!

After that, you will need to sort your mega feed by date, so it looks like a regular ol’ RSS feed. To do that, click on “Operators” on the left sidebar and then drag and drop “Sort” onto the grid. Don’t worry if this looks messy, you don’t get any points for making it look nice yet.

On the box that says “Sort” you are going to want to select “Publication Date” on the drop down box. In the next drop down box you see (to the right of the first one) you need to select “descending” as the order you would like your feed to be displayed. That will cause all of the newest entries on your feed to be displayed at the top.

Connect the Dots!

Next, you see that little circle under each of the boxes you have created? You need to connect them all together so they will work as one. Start with the “Feed Fetch” box. Drag the little circle down to down to the top of “Sort”. If you did it correctly you should see a blue line connecting the two now. Next click on the circle under “Sort” and connect it to the circle on top of “Pipe Output”.

Your almost done! In the upper right corner you should see a button that says “Publish”. Click that. A new box will come up and give you a lot of information to fill out about your feed. You can name it, put a description and some keywords. After doing that, click “Publish” at the bottom of that box.

Fill in the Blanks!

Now click on the link that says “Back to My Pipes”. If everything was done correctly you should now see your newly created pipe listed there. Click on the name of your pipe and you can see a lot of information about it. The next thing you want to do is hit the “Run this Pipe” link.

Run Your New Pipe!

Now you should see a Web page representation of your mega feed. Click on the link that says “Subscribe” and you will be given a list of options to choose from. There are a great number of ways you can keep up to date with this feed.

The one you pick is up to you. Here is the final product for the mega ego feed that I created! Neat, hu?

Yahoo! PipesSo now you have your own egotistical RSS feed to keep track of all of your different posts to all these different places. Even if you don’t have as many blogs or write at as many places as I do – you can still make use of this tool. You could combine your del.icio.us links and your Flickr feeds to keep track of your favorite links and photos. You could get the RSS feeds for all your friends’ blogs on MySpace and make one feed to track them all. The only limit is needing an RSS feed and your imagination.

+ Now Learn How To Plug That UGLY Feed Address Into FeedBurner!

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Comparing Online Calendars

Jan/09 in Online Apps

I couldn’t find a traditional wall calendar that I liked this year, so I figured this might be as good of a time as any to start using an Online one. Now I don’t need too many neat features – I just need an easy Online application that allows me to mark certain days – like my work days, or days that I need to do something.

I am not setting up business meetings. I am not planning every second of every day. I want a calendar that will allow me to do the simple task of leaving one note on a day saying that I need to do something. Just like you would write down on your traditional calendar.

Yahoo! Calendar Icon Yahoo! Calendar

Now that you know what I wanted – now I will tell you what I looked at. Yahoo! Calendar was the first one I looked at, since I already use Yahoo! Mail for my E-mail needs. The major problem here is that they have yet to update the calendar interface to match the snazzy new Yahoo! Mail interface. It keeps transporting me back to the old ugly Yahoo! Mail interface to look at my calendar. Not good at all.

Final Thoughts on Yahoo! Calendar:
Built in functionality with Yahoo’s E-mail and Notes, too bad Calendar and Notes have yet to get a redesign to match Yahoo’s new webmail interface.

Yahoo! Calendar

Yahoo’s calendar was easy enough to add to (just click the add link on the date) but it still asked me to fill in about five more boxes than I wanted to. I liked the fact that it had various views, but I want the 30 day traditional look. Maybe once Yahoo! updates it to match and work better with the new Web mail interface I will give it a second shot. Right now though it is not for me.

30 Boxes Icon 30 Boxes

Next up I tried 30 Boxes. This looks a lot better than Yahoo! Mail (cleaner interface, easier time getting started) but still seems to be lacking in a few areas. I don’t need a big social experience with my calendar. Nobody wants to know the dates I have marked and I am not sure I would want them to know either.

30 Boxes

Adding an event was super easy, a two click process. I really liked that. 30 Boxes just didn’t give me the right vibe though. It is a nice tool, but not the one I am looking for right now.

Final Thoughts on 30 Boxes:
Quick and easy access to your calendars – but the customization is a little strange. I would like to see Yahoo! buy them out and build toss it in as a replacement to the calendar Yahoo! offers right now.

Google Calendar Icon Google Calendar

So that leaves us with Google Calendar. Now I had looked at Google’s Online calendar before and was a little less than impressed. The idea of having different color coded calendars won me over though. It was as easy to add to as 30 Boxes and gave me the interaction with other services (which I was looking for at Yahoo with the webmail and calendar interaction).

Google Calendar

I also was able to setup a widget-like thing on my Google personalized start page to show my calendar as well. This, plus having Google Reader on my start page are the reasons I use Google’s over all the others out there.

Final Thoughts on Google Calendar:
The king of the mountain as far as Online calendars go right now. Quick and easy interface – and then you toss in the fact it works with my start page? This one takes the best of the previous two and gives me something I can use.

So Who Was the Winner? You!

So when the dust settled and I was ready to make my mind up, I decided to go with Google Calendar. The good thing here is that many different people have many different needs. So with this many options, everybody should be able to find what they are looking for. You might just have to go out and do a few taste test with all of them before you find the one you really love to use.

Do you have a favorite? If so – tell me what it is and why you use it!

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What Yahoo Mail Needs

Dec/04 in Online Apps

The Yahoo Mail team came out with some excellent tips for searching my E-mails in the new Yahoo Mail Beta that has been out for a while now. I really love the new Yahoo Mail, but there are a few things that I wish they would hurry up and finish or do.

1. I want a better RSS feed reader. The one included right now sucks. Give me something like Google Reader and I will switch in an instant. It would be nice to have my mail and RSS feeds all in one spot, but right now when it comes to RSS Google is just giving me a lot more.

2. Let’s hurry up and get Calendar and Notepad working. I never really used these features in the old Yahoo! Mail, so give me something that is worth using. If you do not, then at least give me the option of getting rid of the buttons. (That could also be said for the RSS reader)

3. Give me the option to always reply in plain text. I really don’t like having to switch back to plain text every time I reply to a message. There should be a setting in the options somewhere that says “only send E-mail with plain text”. Get that in there and I would be happy.

Have anything else that needs to be done that I might have missed?

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Yahoo! Search Builder

Aug/08 in Online Apps

Now I was just saying the other day that I needed a good resource for creating a personalized search engine. I think Yahoo! has delivered.

+ See Yahoo! Search Builder in Action!
+ Read About Yahoo! Search Builder on Tech Crunch!

I am looking forward to playing with this. Yahoo! has actually done a better job than Google has at re-indexing all my Web pages since I moved from Blogware to my own server space. It has been a while since I used Yahoo! as a default search engine, but it is looking pretty sweet with the search builder tossed in there.

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Search Engine Wars

Feb/10 in Odds & Ends

The search engine battles are heating up! With Yahoo, MSN and Google all fighting for searching room in your browser, who is your favorite? I thought I would take a little time to look at two new searching features back to back to see who really has the edge in the search engine world.

Yahoo Y!Q Search

I have to say this is one of the coolest things to come out of Yahoo in a long time. It bases the search on a phrase or block of text instead of a keyword type search. Y!Q lets you search from any Web site you are reading and offers a unique way to tell the search engine what kind of information you’re interested in. They also offer many different ways of using it. You can download the tool bar to use it, try it in Yahoo! News, embed it on your Web site, or add it to Firefox. To get the most relevant results, you should select a few lines of text from a page then Y!Q will give you a more focused search result. It is definitely worth playing around with. I might even think about adding the embedded results on my own blog here sometime.

Google Video Search

I could go a lot deeper into this, but in a nutshell I’ll just say it sucks. Just from the name, “Google Video Search” you would think you’d actually get video results, right? Wrong! Google instead searches transcripts of the shows and gives you four or five screen shots. Whoopty-doo! They will also tell me when a show will be on next. Fortunately though, so does my TV Guide. Google dropped the ball with this one big time. If you want a real video search, go try Yahoo! Video Search. That is the type of service I expected to see.

Google has hit the glass ceiling for now I believe and others are quickly catching up with them. They have proved that not everything they roll out with is a success, and I really doubt that things like Google’s video search will be the “new trend setter” like Gmail and the Google search in itself was.

I know a lot of folks have turned their nose up at Yahoo! Search, but I would say give them another shot! Google still has better basic results, but some of the innovations the Yahoo team is coming up with is blowing Google out of the water for now. Then again with Google getting into the map business – well let’s just say this one is far from over!

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