nyc.locationscout.us

…yet another adventure in deploying lightweight do-it-yourself (DIY) tech solutions inna location scoutin’ bidness.

The title says it all. I was looking for a way to aggregate (collect) bookmarks (…favorites…posts) on del.icio.us that are most relevant to location scouting.

Conventional wisdom would seem to dictate that a search of tags such as “location scout” would be in order.

There are several del.icio.us-specific peculiarities that make this a more complicated task than it might seem on the surface: Because of the way del.icio.us handles tags, multiple word phrases (i.e. location scout) must be joined together so there are no spaces between the words, otherwise “location” and “scout” become two different tags. Obviously there are a number of ways to accomplish this; I decided that:

1. “locationscout“
2. “location+scout“
3. “location-scout” and
4. “location_scout“

…were likely to be the most popular syntaxes.

Also the mashup I found to aggregate the bookmarks has a 4-tag limit (more about this shortly), so, given the parameters, the syntaxes above dovetailed into the plan pretty smoothly.

Tag searching using the del.icio.us website interface is limited to just one tag. I needed to find a way to search del.icio.us using multiple tags at once.

Enter Yahoo Pipes. Pipes is a recent “whatsit?” (to me, anyway …all I know is it will “do stuff” using various web2.0 features such as accessing and interfacing with various API’s, databases and such and that there has been a good deal of chatter in the tech circles lately about Pipes. It does look a little like Ning, but I haven’t had a chance to play with Pipes at all other than this little side-project. (BTW some people think I am a bit of a techy, but it’s not true; real techies are always able to see that I am just someone who knows enough to be annoying and dangerous- just ask my web host

In a nutshell, “someone” (one Derek Van Vliet, actually…) figured out how search del.icio.us using 4 tags simultaneously as well as aggregating the results. The results are effective because they consist of posts that only had to use at least *one* of the tags as opposed to a heavily filtered list including only posts having to use all the tags, the former seeming to be the default of many database searches. Yet, still, the Pipe seemed to handle filtering out “noise” results such as “boy scout” or “store location”, etc. very well.

del.icio.us Tag Masher - 4 Tags Pipe

…which I renamed slightly to reflect the manner in which I am using the pipe, which is ok because all this kind of stuff in this neck of cyberspace is pretty open-source and in fact experimentation is generally encouraged.

Once I ran the Pipe and had my results (a web page exportable as an rss xml feed, of course like any good web2.0 app should…)

I took the feed link and made a Feedburner feed. I like Feedburner because there are so many additional features available that can be used on raw rss feeds. If you have worked with Feedburner much at all, you’ll know what I am talking about.

del.icio.us :: TagMasher :: locationscout :: location+scout :: location-scout :: location_scout Feedburner Feed

While I was setting up the Feedburner feed, I set up a SpringWidget, which is the box below and which is used to display the feed here on this website.

What? of course, these are all free web services. (Altho, not provided by me)

Update I also used the tags “locationscouting“, “location+scouting“, “location-scouting” and “location_scouting” on del.icio.us Tag Masher - 4 Tags Pipe.

del.icio.us Tag Masher - 4 Tags with tags locationscouting, location+scouting, location-scouting, location_scouting (Derek van Vliet’s original)

del.icio.us Tag Masher - 4 Tags with tags locationscouting, location+scouting, location-scouting, location_scouting (my clone)

Feedburner Feed made from Derek’s Pipe w/ tags applied:

Yahoo Feed of my clone:

Cloned del.icio.us Tag Masher - 4 Tags with tags locationscouting, location+scouting, location-scouting, location_scouting Grazr Widget

Update 3/21/08 | I cloned it! I felt a lot less intimidated by THE PIPE this time out so I just went in there with a hammer and a wrench … removed (from this post) …SpringWidget, added (to this post) …original Pipe note(s), my clone / feed URL, added map | original timestamp: April 07, 2007 @ 14:29

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