Merging multiple blog feeds into Facebook Notes with Yahoo Pipes

I started a second blog, Vibogafi, for writing about media, and wanted to display updates from that and this blog using the Facebook Notes application. Notes only allows users to import one RSS feed, so I had to merge both my RSS feeds first.

One aggregation or mashup system that came to mind was Yahoo Pipes. If you have a Yahoo account, then you can create your personal pipes. I followed the video tutorial and got my pipe working the second time around. Some tips and minor gotchas:

• When entering the Blogger feed URL in the Pipes Fetch Feed gadget, you cannot simply enter http://<myblog>.blogspot.com and expect the gadget to find the feed URL; instead, you have to enter the entire feed URL, which looks like http://<myblog>.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.
• Check the Pipes Debugger output by selecting each gadget. If you do not get the expected output, try to fix the problem before proceeding.
• If you just want to merge two or more feeds, just use one Fetch Feed gadget instead of multiple Fetch Feed and one Union gadget; the Fetch Feed gadget allows you to enter more than one URL.
• To use your new Pipe in Facebook Notes, you have to use your pipe's RSS output, whose URL ends with &_render=rss, not just the pipe's basic address. (Upon hindsight, it is obvious, but I tripped over that problem, too.)

Localize dates in Scientific American

Scientific American formats dates in its pages as m/d/yy, while I prefer d/m/yy. Like an earlier post about formatting dates in Blogger's Dashboard, this Greasemonkey script uses a regular expression to find date strings in a page, and switches the month and day values.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Scientific American localize dates
// @namespace      kamhungsoh.com
// @description    Convert dates from mm/dd/yy to dd/mm/yy format
// @require        http://jqueryjs.googlecode.com/files/jquery-1.3.2.min.js
// @include        http://www.scientificamerican.com/*
// ==/UserScript==

$('span').each(function() {
  var s = $(this).text().replace(/(.*)(\d+)\/(\d+)\/(\d+)/, '$1$3/$2/$4');
  $(this).text(s);
});

The script only works for the home page and I haven't figured out why I can't construct an expression to locate date strings in articles. Another thing to note is that jQuery's .text() function returns all the text values in a node, so some of the formatting, such as strong tags, are lost when the script replaces the text.

Reformatting post dates in Blogger Dashboard

In the Blogger Dashboard, the posting date of your entries are in mm/dd/yy format and Google doesn't provide a way to localize it or choose a date format. Here's how you can use a Greasemonkey script to convert dates in Dashboard to dd/mm/yy format.

The dates in Dashboard have this structure:

<td class="date">
  <span>3/6/09</span>
</td>

The following script uses jQuery to iterate through all span nodes of td elements with a date class attribute, then applies the Javascript string replace() function to swap the first two numbers in the span node. To change the output string, just modify the second argument of the replace() function.

// ==UserScript==
// @name           blogger.com localize dashboard date
// @namespace      kamhungsoh.com
// @description    Convert date format from m/d/yy to d/m/yy.
// @require        http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3/jquery.min.js
// @include        http://www.blogger.com/posts.g*
// ==/UserScript==

$("td.date > span").each(function() {
  var s = $(this).text().replace(/(\d+)\/(\d+)/, '$2\/$1');
  $(this).text(s);
});

The first argument of the replace() function is a regular expression where \d is a meta-character for a digit, + matches one or more of the preceding character (e.g. 4 or 23) and the parentheses group the characters to be memorised. The forward slash has to be escaped, \/, to allow us to match it in the input string. In the second argument, the $2/$1 represents the second and first memorised strings.

Filtering busy mailing lists in Gmail

I subscribe to a busy mailing list and find that I only keep some of the messages and delete the rest. Then I realised it would be less work to automatically delete all messages from this list first and only keep the ones that interested me.

Here's how I set up my mailing list filter in Gmail:

1. Specify the criteria (e.g. the mailing list name).
2. Mark Skip the inbox (Archive it).
3. Pick a label from the Apply the label field.
4. Mark Delete it.

Using this filter, messages that match the criteria are automatically labelled and moved into the Bin (or Trash). I read messages from the mailing list in the Bin and if I want to keep one, I just uncheck the Bin label in the message's tool bar.