How not to do RSS/Atom Feeds; Or Smart Lists NetNewsWire; Yahoo Pipes to the rescue
I love iGTD. It’s an awesome piece of software. Bartek works really hard on it and it has a thriving community. Mostly Bartek announces new releases on a thread on the iGTD forums. The forums software is PHP Bulletin Board.
However it commits a heinous crime against feeds. While I do browse the forums, I only care about announcements in my feed reader. Everything else is noise. In the last four days the forum has generated 215 items for me to read in Netnewswire. Providing global level non-specific RSS feeds sucks.
Netnewswire does have a natty feature called ‘Smart Lists’ which filters akin to an iTunes smart folder. The problem is to filter you must already have the content. So I have to subscribe to all that noise someplace in order to make a smart list which filters what I need. That’s just dumb. What I really want is a ’smart feed’ where I can specify which kinds of items I do or don’t want to see. RSS coupled with regex basically.
Yahoo! Pipes however made it super easy to fix this. Looking at the global feed for the message board I had one release announcement saved. It was titled iGTD announcements :: iGTD 1.4.1 released
. The simple format is that the topic is separated from the post title with ::
. All I really need is to exclude everything not starting with iGTD announcements ::
so I only get the posts which relate to announcements. This took around 15 seconds in Pipes. I saved and published the new feed of iGTD release announcements as RSS.
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iGTD, yahoo, yahoopipes, pipes, phpbb, netnewswire, rss, atom, feeds