TSS Troubles with the Sunday Salon

You'll probably have noticed that there was some trouble with the Salon over the last weekend. Most posts didn't go through, though some snuck by. I've been playing with it all week trying to get things working, but I'm hindered by my own ignorance and the fact that Yahoo Pipes is slow and has apparently been having problems itself.

At any rate, I wound up reorganizing the data that gets fed into the Pipe. Instead of taking the RSS feeds and tags from a single Google spreadsheet, it's now taking that information from a bunch of different spreadsheets, aggregating it in a handful of Pipes, and then aggregating outputs from those Pipes in a single Pipe. My idea was that maybe it would be better able to handle the data in smaller doses. Again, I have no idea what I'm doing. I've just been experimenting. But at present, at least, it seems to be working. You should see feeds from last week starting to come through your RSS readers.

I've also been trying to think of an alternative to aggregating the feeds in this way, but so far I've not been able to come up with a solution. There are other aggregators out there, using which you can mash different feeds together to create a single feed, but none seem as powerful as Pipes, and none seem able to add a tag to the post title (which I find very helpful when looking through Salon posts). We're dealing with almost 500 different feeds here, which is a lot of information. Yahoo Pipes, if it worked reliably and was faster, would really be the ideal solution.

So all of this is making me think that, unless an alternative solution presents itself, maybe the growth of the Salon should be halted at 500 members. (We're currently at 480.) Thoughts? Ideas?

Comments

[Maxine]

1.

I'm afraid I long since stopped reading the sunday salon posts. For the first few weeks it seemed to work well, but when it reached a certain number, it lost that friendly feel and began reading like "just a blog post" - and frankly most of the blogs in TSS (that I didn't read already) weren't to my taste. So, sorry, can't really help! The FriendFeed Yahoo pipe feed broke ages ago, back in the early days, and as mentioned to another post, I don't think Yahoo pipes works very well any more, from what I've heard others say.

I don't mean to be churlish about TSS, it was and is a great idea - but most of the posts were about books that just didn't interest me. Our crime&mystery group at Friend Feed is much smaller but very active, because we all like reading fairly similar sorts of book (though opinions on the same title vary wildly!). It works well to have a mix of blog RSS feeds and posted links, with conversations, all in one place.

[Debra Hamel]

2.

Hi, Maxine. Thanks for your note. I know what you mean about the Salon losing some of its original feel once it got so big. It's certainly not what we originally envisioned! I can see that FriendFeed could supply a more comfortable, living room-y environment.

So, I don't know. The Salon offers something different, and members seem to enjoy participating, so I certainly wouldn't want it to end. One of the benefits is that entices people to visit your blog if they want to learn more, while at the same time aggregating the posts in one place (theoretically; when it works) so that you don't have to step outside your RSS reader.

Well, I'll keep my eye open for alternatives, but I don't anticipate anything presenting itself unfortunately.

(I should add, though, that when it works Yahoo Pipes is/are fun to play with. I mean, just manipulating and connecting the little input devices is a pleasure.)

[Kerrie]

3.

Hello Deb

I counted 85 posts come through from Yahoo Pipes into my RSS reader - they eventually came through onThursday. Today a whole lot more have come through - according to my RSS reader it churned out 652 feeds today, but many of them are from previous SS posts, even some back to 2007. Like Maxine, I'm a bit sad that there aren't more crime fiction readers in the SS community, but the community itself is great. Thanks for persevering.

[Debra Hamel]

4.

Yikes. Sorry about the massive influx of posts. But I'm glad they came through. (Google Reader seems to have given up on trying to download them for me. Just as well, I suppose.)

Hopefully this rearrangement of the feeds will result in Yahoo Pipes working more consistently. The 652 posts may be a good sign.

[Clare Swindlehurst]

5.

Deb have you tried Feed Rinse? That might work for you instead of Yahoo Pipes.

[Debra Hamel]

6.

Hi, Clare. Thanks. I tried it and liked it, but I think there was some issue.... I guess that it exports the feeds as an OPML file. That's fine for an individual user, but it seems inconvenient for use with a group.

[Maxine]

7.

Just to note that the Sunday Salon posts have suddenly started coming through in Friend Feed today, for the first time in literally months, so whatever you did this week has worked, Debra!
I'll look out for posts of interest now - in fact the first one I saw was a review of Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

I agree with what you write, Debra, about the SS being a great resource for blog posts about books - ideally, book reviews. For my part I already follow a large number of blogs that review books I'm likely to either read or be interested in knowing about - so 500 more posts on that front is just too many for me! But I quite agree that it is a great resource for many and did not mean to imply I thought it should be stopped.

Another thing is that in the early weeks, one read a lot of posts by people along lines of not knowing what to write for their post, or how they hadn't read anything that week, etc. I imagine it has by now calmed down a bit and people just post a book review or similar book-related post on Sunday if they have something to write, not if they don't = which is much better than reading the same "moan" on lots of different blogs!

[Debra Hamel]

8.

This is great, Maxine! I'm really surprised it worked. So I guess even though it's dealing with the same amount of data, the fact that it's doing it in different-sized chunks works.

Now I have to decide if I should stop accepting new members when we hit 500. (This will happen pretty quickly, the way we've been growing.) I don't really want to, but I think it may be wise. Or, we could go on and see if this reorganization of the Pipes allows us to handle a much greater quantity.