SDN checks it’s “pipes”

There is a rapidly-growing body of well-structured data available online in the form of XML feeds. These feeds range from simple lists of blog entries and news stories to more structured, machine-generated data sources like the Yahoo! Maps Traffic RSS feed. Because of the dearth of tools for manipulating these data sources in meaningful ways, their use has so far largely been limited to feed readers.

– source SDN and BPX are full of RSS feeds which of course are XML based feeds. Now SAP is full of them as well and you can get them with little effort, or with my favorite which is one of the first things I implemented from SDN. Now of course Pipes sits outside of your firewall so you are a bit limited but let’s take a look at bringing data into your system. For that I will take a recent issue that came up over a coffee (OK the two of us were a few thousands miles apart but still). We implemented or more so we enabled external bloggers to blog and bring the data to SDN and BPX not that a blogger has to redo their blogs or start a whole new one if they are already established often this is quite good when their focus is not really 100% what our community is looking for but occasionally they have something cool to share with us. Technorati tags: sdn blogger You can find more details here. Quite a list of bloggers already there, 14 and counting! So one of the problems we have though is what happens when anyone starts using the tags? I mena we don’t want SPLOGS and SPAMMERS to just start using the tag and flooding us with garbarge right – so we make a quick check of who is who and ensure that they are at least “real” with legit information. So of course this meant custom development or did it? [Enter Pipes] Now here is a product out there than can do some filtering for me and give me the results as a new RSS feed which I could then use inside of our community. Now this is quite interesting but does it work? I decided to give it a try… I did the whole drag and drop of the different components:

• Fetch
• Text Input
• Filter
• Sort
• Output

For the final one I would leave out the Text input and just hard code the values we “approve” or I should say from the legitimate bloggers we know about to prevent the SPAMMERS. But this is just a test which I published so you can give a look yourself if you like, should even be able to clone it and modify your own copy all you like. With it all together all that was left was to run it. Without text input it returned the entire list. But with input and I choose that of Blag since he’s got a great little blog over there in Perú. As you can see I got my filtered list and I have an RSS feed to subscribe to and have just saved myself time for developing a solution, not bad for 15 minutes of work.