Pipe Dream

I've created a couple new Yahoo! Pipes for Michael David Smith's writing on College Football Talk and Pro Football Talk. It probably would have been more useful to put these together earlier in the football season, but I never got around to it (which was just kind of dumb on my part, since it took all of five minutes to put these feeds together). Here's the College Football Talk feed URL and here's the one for Pro Football Talk.

Superbowl of Blogging

Three of my favorite sports bloggers are at the Superbowl right now. That's great news for them and great news for bloggers in general, I suppose. At first, I was somewhat disappointed, since everyone was writing about the same stuff, none of which was all that interesting to me. The blogging soon became a lot more interesting. MJD and Will have mostly focused on slice-of-life Superbowl stories and outsider observations of the Superbowl media circus. MDS has taken a different approach and has apparently been attending every single press conference he has been able to get into and written some really interesting stuff about the Superbowl, the Hall of Fame, the player's union, and even next season. I've really enjoyed the variety of perspectives offered by these three bloggers, from MDS' investigative journalism to MJD's epic bowling matches against Matt Leinart and Derek Anderson, to Will's thoughts on media day. I hope the actual game is as interesting.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it

I finally got around to checking out Yahoo! Pipes today. I was trying to figure out an easy way to create an RSS feed that would pull out all of the Fanhouse posts written by MDS. The default RSS feed that AOL publishes for all of the Fanhouse bloggers is the general feed for the entire site. I heard about Pipes whenever it came it (sometime last year, if memory serves) and I thought it could do stuff like this but I really wasn't sure. As luck would have it, this is exactly the kind of thing that Pipes was designed for. I have created a pipe called Fanhouse MDS and made it available as an RSS feed that mines the Fanhouse RSS feed for Michael David Smith's posts. It seems to be working correctly, but it only fetches the 20 most recent posts at a time. This doesn't seem to be a problem once you plug the feed into an RSS reader that keeps track of history, but if you're viewing the output of feed by itself, you might only see a couple of MDS posts (or possibly none), although I can't image it's too often that his Fanhouse colleagues manage to crank out 20 or more posts before he has a chance to publish at least a couple.