Making Corporate Data As Accessible As A Blog
Wednesday, May 23, 2007

From Tom Smith at InformationWeek:

"...One of the more compelling product pitches I heard at Interop today came from a low-profile developer of software components called /n Software. Got lots of corporate data built up that your knowledge workers can't find or access? Need a lightweight, low-impact way to disseminate data from various systems internally or to partners? ..."

Read the full article at the InformationWeek Blog: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/05/making_corporat.html

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RSSBus at Interop Las Vegas 2007!
Monday, May 21, 2007

If you happen to be in Las Vegas this week please stop by the RSSBus Booth at Interop Las Vegas 2007. Members of the RSSBus team will be exhibiting in the Web 2.0 pavilion and would love to meet with you and hear feedback. In fact, drop off your business card and we'll even send you a free single server license of RSSBus Feed Server.    

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RSSBus Pipes - Really Simple
Friday, May 11, 2007

[by Lance Robinson, Tech Evangelist]

First, here is a feed of my Flickr Contacts' Favorite photos.

Second, here is my explanation of why it is a big deal. Yesterday I saw this post from Jeremy Zawodny on the Yahoo Developer Network blog about a Yahoo Pipe that generates a feed of Flickr contacts' favorite photos. Jeremy says it's the "coolest Pipe I've seen for a while now".

complex pipe

I agree, this is a great pipe. The problem is - take a look at the compexity of this pipe (pictured to the right). Its a maze, a big mess.

But...it is a useful maze, so how can I simplify it? RSSBus.

RSSBus didn't contain any FlickrOps yesterday (except one yahooFlickrSearch operation that returns a feed of Flickr search results), but now it does.  I could have accomplished my goal feed using RSSBus' xmlOps to consume and parse the Flickr services. But instead, I used RSSBus' open connector interface to create my own FlickrOps connector. In just a few minutes I added a brand new connector to the growing list, which I have shared on RSSBus.com.

At this point, it literally took me about 1 minute to create a new 7 line RSSBus script that produces the desired RSS feed.  The script simply gets a username (it defaults to my Flickr username) and then pipes together calls to the flickrContacts and flickrFavorites operations that are defined in my new RSSBus connector:


<rsb:set attr="username" value="[username | def('lmrobins')]" />
<rsb:set attr="pagesize" value="[pagesize| def('0')]" />

<rsb:pipe>
  <rsb:call op="flickrNSID" />
  <rsb:call op="flickrContacts" />
  <rsb:call op="flickrFavorites" pagesize="[pagesize]"/>
</rsb:pipe>

You can try the finished product out for yourself, here is the url. I added some extras like a customized feed title and description, and links back to Flickr inside the rss description.  To customize this feed to your own contacts, just provide your own username in the querystring. For example, here is what it would look like for Alto Maltes (the creator of the pipe).  Finally, here is the source of the script so that you can download it and run it on your own RSSBus installation.

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Christmas shopping made easier: Amazon Wishlist
Thursday, May 10, 2007

Would you like to know the most suitable gift for the people you know? The script presented here, runs through the emails in your Inbox, checks if any of these folks have an Amazon Wishlist and presents it all as a RSS Feed.

<rsb:info

  description="Get an Amazon wishlists for the most active emailers in an inbox.">

  <input name="server" description="The IMAP server." />

  <input name="user" description="The IMAP username for authentication." />

  <input name="password" description="The IMAP password for authentication." />

  <input name="criteria" description="The IMAP search criteria." />

  <input name="pagesize" description="The page size." default="10" />

</rsb:info>

 

<rsb:set attr="server" value="MY_SERVER" />

<rsb:set attr="user" value="MY_USER" />

<rsb:set attr="password" value="MY_PASSWORD" />

<rsb:set attr="criteria" value="MY_CRITERIA" />

 

<rsb:call save="imapfeed" op="imapSearch?searchcriteria=[criteria]" />

 

<rsb:call save="unionfeed"

op="feedUnion?feed=[_feeds.imapfeed | urlencode]&filter=imap:fromemail" />

 

<rsb:call op="feedSort?feed=[_feeds.unionfeed | urlencode]&sortby=rsb:count&type=numeric"

pagesize="[_input.pagesize]">

  <rsb:call op="amazonListSearch?email=[imap:fromemail]&type=wish">

    <rsb:push />

    <rsb:else>

      <rsb:push title="No Amazon wishlist for [imap:fromemail]" />

    </rsb:else>

  </rsb:call>

</rsb:call>



Would you like to do the same for emails in your gmail account? Replace ImapOps with PopOps, also included with the RSSBus Feed Server.

See this entry for a discussion of how this script works.

Downloads: RSBScript | ImapOps | AmazonOps
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Jon Udell Discusses RSSBus on ITConversations
Monday, May 07, 2007

In the latest "Interviews with Innovators" podcast at ITConversations, Jon Udell takes and in-depth look at RSSBus and the value of using feeds as simple services:

"By normalizing all data feeds to "flattened" sets of name/value pairs, RSSBus trades away some of the power of advanced data modeling in order to reach a broad population of developers - and even, ideally, ordinary information workers who will be able to pull feeds into their spreadsheets, combine and filter them, and publish their transformed feeds back out to the Net."

 

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