I’m finding it really difficult to keep up with the groups that I’ve joined on Network – for a casual visitor the snapshot page can be next to useless because it fills up so quickly with commenting activity. The comment threads on Network are awesome but I’d like a single pointer to the posts growing them instead than fifty individual comment alerts!
Groups do all have other alerting mechanisms, though, in the form of email and RSS.
Email alerts are just evil and subscribing to fifty different RSS feeds would be messy, so I hooked up a single, consolidated feed using Yahoo! Pipes:
Enter your username where it says ’what’s your Nature Network username?’ and then click on ‘Run Pipe’ – it’ll fetch all your (public) group memberships then merge all of the RSS forum and noticeboard feeds into a single consolidated feed.
Once the pipe has run use the ‘more options’ menu to get the RSS feed.
Your username is the last bit of the web address of your profile page, e.g.
http://network.nature.com/profile/euan username is euan
http://network.nature.com/profile/UB614A588 username is UB614A588
http://network.nature.com/profile/henrygee you get the idea
If you join any new groups they’ll be added to your consolidated feed automagically.
post over, rambling nerdiness follows
The nice thing about Pipes is that if you really want you can get updates via SMS or Instant Messenger when somebody posts a new forum topic. JSON, too, if you fancy building a blog sidebar.
You can also build on existing Pipes, so it’d be good to extend this one to, for example, filter out everything that wasn’t authored by you. Then you’d have an RSS feed of your activity on Network – perfect for FriendFeed.
I’d like Network to have some sort of ‘follow’ mechanism – a little icon next to comment threads, blogs and groups which when clicked added any updates there to a single, personalized feed. There’d be a single page where you could uncheck items and set up filters like the one described above.
This is neat. Thank you for sharing it with us.
(have gotten into a habit of just deleting the update emails that I receive; and notice now that it has been ages since I have participated on any of the forums)
Euan, very nice. I very much prefer RSS to Email for updates of my Nature Network activities. I was able to filter out only my posts by modifying your pipe, but my name is hardcoded.
Pipes for Scientists would be an unusual but very helpful topic for a seminar…
Lovely piece of plumbing and I second the notion of a follow button. I use pipes quite a bit for managing data feeds out of our lab books but haven’t really done much beyond basic filtering and aggregating.
Excuse my ignorance, but you already can get an RSS feed of your network snapshot. That’s how I read it, agreed that to look at it on the NN page it isn’t very useful, especially when someone has just uploaded all their publications or made friends with lots of other people (at least one can opt out of events now).
I am a member of a Yahoo pipes RSS reading group (called Sunday Salon). There are about 150 blogs in it now, and we all post on a Sunday about what we are reading. However, it does have stability problems and also time-lag problems.
OK, I just tried it and it is a lot better than the Nature Network snapshot RSS, so I’ve answered my own question, and thanks, Euan!
I didn’t realize that you could opt-out of some updates, that’s useful!
Yeah, I suppose the post confuses two issues – one is keeping up to date with group forums and the other is the snapshot. It’s because up to now I only ever remembered to check a group when somebody I was following posted there. :) This is a consolidated feed of new forum and noticeboard posts by anybody in the group, though.
Hi everyone,
We are in the midst of reviewing the snapshot and all the RSS feeds on NN. We realize that the activity and content on the site has grown so much (yay!) that a lot of features on the site now need to be reworked to accommodate this. Improving the user profile, snapshot and how we do RSS feeds (more feeds and better management of them) are at the top of the list, as well as improving/simplifying the navigation. Next month we will deploy quite a few changes that will improve the groups and forums, so once that’s done, we’ll get started on all these other things. Thanks Euan for the superfeed, great idea.
Just to note I am finding this consolidated feed incredibly useful, thanks again Euan. I am just posting about it over at the Network bloggers forum, to spread the word.