Category Archives: web2.0

My first pipe

Posted on by
Reply

Whilst the US are asleep and Yahoo Pipes is up, I’ve been having a quick play.

My initial idea was to utilise the machine tags feature of flickr to create a pipe which would work with photos tagged by members of the Hursley photo club. Members who post to flickr have used machine tags to tag photos taken on our recent trip to Winchester. The following tags are in use:

So the idea was to have a number of inputs which would allow you to then utilise the machine tags to find pictures that matched. To begin with I started with location and member. Not overly exciting, but a start.

Getting the input is easy, just use a couple of text inputs, then a string concatenation to turn them into the machine tags, which in turn was wired to another string concatenation to create the search string e.g. “hurlabphoto:member=aspender hurlabphoto:location=winchester”. I then fed this into the flickr source module. However whilst it appeared to handle a single machine tag ok, it didn’t return results if two were present. Instead, I used the URLBuilder and Fetch modules to create a valid flickr feed request (using the API reference documentation to get it right) which worked.

What this gave me was a feed containing the photos which matched both the location and member. Unfortunately this is where things started to get disappointing. Firstly, it would be nice to be able to use wildcards with the machine tags, but they are only supported when using the full blown flickr APIs. So you have to input both a member and a location. Additionally there are not any facilities for validating/checking inputs so you cannot even check for null/empty and not include that input as a result. What’s more, it would be nice to be able to provide a list/drop down style of input. For example it would be awesome to be able to do a wildcard search on a machine tag such as hurlabphoto:member and then take all the values to populate a drop down to present to the user.

One way I tried to get around this problem was to initially retrieve all photos tagged with hurlabphoto then attempt to successively filter on the tags returned for each photo using the inputs. In the results returned by flickr, the tags are contained as such:


<category term="hurlabphoto" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
<category term="hurlabphoto:location=winchester" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
<category term="hurlabphoto:date=20070127" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
<category term="hurlabphoto:member=aspender" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />
<category term="hurlabphoto:subject=candid" scheme="http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/" />

The filter node recognises the term attribute, but unfortunately doesn’t seem to successfully return results when you filter against it with a machine tag such as hurlabphoto:member=aspender.

So, the net result is that I’ve created a pipe which simply removes the need to insert the full machine tag and which also sorts the results. Not very useful. Most of this is down to the current limitations of machine tag searching by anything other than the full API, something which will hopefully be relaxed over time. When/if it does, then the combination of flickr and pipes will be very powerful indeed.

So, finally, if you want to have a play with the pipe and maybe play around with taking a clone of it, you will find it here. FYI, valid values for the inputs are:

location: winchester
member: aspender, currie, calanais, Fragments of eternity, Liam O’Neill

Yahoo Pipes

Posted on by
1

As previously mentioned, I have a grand plan to do some funky web2.0 style stuff on this web site. However, with the new Yahoo Pipes service, maybe I don’t need the space after all. The premise behind Pipes is to bring the power of Unix pipes and filters to the world of feeds, allowing the mashup of multiple feeds into one. The service supports some pretty powerful bit of functionality (or modules as they call them) to perform analysis and processing of the feeds. There’s some good posts over on the O’Reilly Radar about how Pipes work, and one from a rather excited Tim O’Reilly on why he thinks Pipes is a “milestone in internet history”.

My last.fm profile

Posted on by
1

In my increasing efforts to get with the social networking programme, I’m now signed up to last.fm. You can view my profile here. Feel free to add me as a friend.

I’m using the iScrobbler client on OS X rather than the default last.fm one as it purports to include the Last Played playlist from iTunes in its scrobblings. This is useful seen as all my music is either on the iMac, or my iPod. Hence you won’t see any updates whilst at work for example until i dock the iPod.

The range of music won’t exactly be representative of my tastes either as I’m currently in the process of re-ripping my quite substantial music collection to a lossless format (FLAC to be precise.) I think I’ll have to go through and prioritise the order they are done in. Already I am pleasantly surprised by the music Andy and Roo seem to listen to. Especially to find out that Roo is a fellow Reindeer Section fan.

Edited to add: Just discovered that iScrobbler has an option to scrobble any shared music I play. That means anything I play from my Linksys NSLU2 NAS device running mt-daapd gets logged as well. This means I can withdraw my comment about not having my full music library at my disposal!