It seems it is becoming increasingly important that you build an online persona for yourself and claim your place in various social networking venues and other sites where you can put your personal stamp. This is particularly true if you work in the tech and web industry, where a degree of Internet savvy and being viewed as a member of the online community is critical. The problem is that as the numbers of these social networks continue to grow it becomes more difficult to keep these sites populated with fresh and interesting content. If you wish to make a good impression online, perhaps the only thing worse than posting that video of you doing the lambada with your neighbors Pomeranian is to have stale and dated content or nothing at all. Furthermore, you should not simply be taking control of search results for your name, your ultimate goal should be to drive traffic to your home site or sites, be those your business, your blog, or your resume. In this day of RSS syndication, why not use the ability to import a feed into most social networks in order to get your content in front of a fresh audience and draw them back to your sites of choice and save yourself the effort of creating fresh content for every single Facebook, MySpace, Virb, and Vox out there. The problem here is that most of these sites allow you to only import one feed and if you are like me, you do actively contribute in multiple places, even if they are low effort like your Delicious bookmarks, Flickr photos, Twitter tweets, and Last.fm scrobbles. There is however, a very easy way to compile all of these feeds into a single feed that can then be important to the site of your choice: Yahoo! Pipes.
The set-up is very simple:
- Go to http://pipes.yahoo.com and select ‘Create Pipe’, you will then be prompted to login to your Yahoo! account.
- On the next screen, you will drag the first item under ‘Sources’, ‘Fetch Feed’ onto the grid that says ‘Drag Modules Here’.
- Since we are only compiling feeds, you can drag the output circle at the bottom of the ‘Fetch Feed’ box directly to the input circle on the ‘Pipe Output’ box.
- Next, you simply need to add your feeds using the RSS addresses for your various sites. use the ‘+’ button next to ‘URL’ to add additional feeds and the ‘x’ button next to the feed to remove it. You can test the output at any time by clicking on the ‘Pipe Output’ box.
- When you have added all of your feeds, click the ‘Save’ button on the upper right. You will be prompted to name your feed at this time. You will then select ‘Publish’ from the upper right navigation. After publishing (with optional description and tags) the phrase ‘Pipe Saved Run Pipe…’ appears on the top of the page. Select ‘Run Pipe…’
- This page represents the results of your compiled RSS feeds. Simply select ‘Subscribe’ to get the RSS feed to for the newly created Pipe and add this to whatever aggregator/importer you like.
There is a lot that can be done with Yahoo! Pipes and while this one is fairly simple it can be very useful for the purpose of lazy man content creation and helping to drive traffic from high profile social networking sites.
technorati tags:Yahoo!, Pipes, RSS, Blog, Social Network
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