Some time after my last post, I completed setting up my technology feed aggregation pipe. Here’s what it looks like:
The feeds (those four blocks in the top-left) are, clockwise from the top & left-most, general programming, PHP, operating systems and general technology, and Ruby. They each feed into a union block, which is then filtered by a set of keywords against each item’s title, and finally they’re checked for duplicate titles or URLs.
The result isn’t pretty.
Two things are immediately obvious when you look at the screenshot above. You can’t tell where anything originated, and, as if to mock me, there are two items with the same exact title (Five Best Virtual-Desktop Managers).
If you read my first post about combining Google Reader & Yahoo Pipes, you’ll know I was concerned about Google’s feed trawling scheduler taking very light notice of my feed because I’m the only one using it. This seems to be the case, as new items come in at a trickle, and I’m almost certainly never going to see some items that should have made it through.
When all is said and done, there’s no way around it. Without Google Reader supporting these features directly, there’s no solution. So as I suggested before, this means I’ll have to do it myself. And that means it’s on again for Sluice.
