SUNDAY SALON: ADMINISTRATIVE NEWS!!!

Per a suggestion in a comment here I've been working on simplifying the Yahoo Pipes that manage the nearly 200 RSS feeds associated with the Salon. I'd been using a method that worked well but was becoming unwieldy: for every five RSS feeds I created a pipe that took the feeds, added a tag (an abbreviated version of the blog's name) to each post title, filtered the titles for the terms "Sunday Salon" or "TSS", and then sorted them by publication date. Each of these sub Pipes would emit an RSS feed, which I then plugged into the main Yahoo Pipe, which took all the output from each and combined it. Worked, as I say, but I was up to using 41 separate Pipes to get the job done, which was getting ridiculous.

So, the commenter suggested that I use instead a Google spreadsheet to keep track of the RSS feeds and their associated tags--a process which would be much simpler to maintain for me. After much effort I managed to get this to work, so that now there are only three elements to the process:

1. The Google Spreadsheet listing all the RSS feeds in column 1 and their associated tags in column 2.

2. The main Yahoo Pipe, which fetches the feed from the spreadsheet, sends it over to the sub Pipe, then gets the results from the sub Pipe, filters them, sorts them by date, and outputs them.

3. The sub Yahoo Pipe loops through the items from the spreadsheet, attaching the tags to each post title. (I would never have been able to figure that one out without cloning a Pipe from someone else.)

What does this mean for you? Hopefully nothing. You won't have to resubscribe to any different feeds. And hopefully the transition to the new system will be smooth and I won't have introduced any errors along the way. But it's possible that my switching over will result in a spate of back posts being republished to your RSS feeds. Please just delete them if so without getting annoyed about it.

There is one other negative, which is that I'll be changing the way the Salon connects to Twitter, and it may result in not all Salon posts being Twittered henceforth. That is, instead of feeding each of those forty-odd RSS feeds to TwitterFeed separately, I'll just be feeding one feed in now. Since TwitterFeed has a limit of five posts per half hour per feed received, this may result in some of the posts not making it to Twitter.

QUESTION: If anyone knows how I can add a space between the tag and the post title via the Pipe (adding a space in the spreadsheet doesn't do it), please let me know. Figured it out. Plus I managed to append the publication date, in parentheses, to the end of every post title. These may be Eastern time, though, so you may find that posts from England, etc., appear to have been posted early.

ALSO: If anyone wants their tag changed--the [BRACKETED] thing that's appended to your post's title in the Salon feed--just let me know. As long as it's unique (you can check the spreadsheet), it can be anything you like. And if anyone wants to be removed from the feed, let me know that too.