April 2, 2009
Objective
To create an aggregate feed of official Wesleyan news, weblog articles and announcements for including in various University pages on wesleyan.edu, facebook.com, linkedin.com, etc.
Method
There are various ways to aggregate feeds for serving to users, either by running software on your own server or using a hosted service. Yahoo! Pipes is the latter kind. It’s a web-based service that provides a method for including feeds, sorting and filtering them, and then outputting the result in a variety of standard formats (e.g. RSS, JSON, HTML, etc.).
The combined feed was constructed from the following sources, and then filtered by item publication date in descending order:
- Wesleyan’s main Twitter feed
- Wesleyan’s main Headlines feed
- the Wesleyan Connection newsletter
- the Alumni News feed
- the President’s weblog, Roth on Wesleyan
- the President’s articles on The Huffington Post
Example
Here the feed data is embedded into the page as a script run from pipes.yahoo.com, with a few parameters to control the layout. (You can also view this feed as HTML or fetch it via RSS.)
Note that JavaScript must be enabled to view this information.