AmateurRadio.com

Not strictly ham radio but parts of it are. For a while I’ve used rss readers to get the content I want into the reader of my choice. For a while that has been Google Reader. But since its demise I’ve lacked a concise and simple way of getting that information into a reader I use daily, MS Outlook. The annoying thing was that there are a bunch of ham radio news aggregators about that do a great job of popping content onto your virtual doorstep but most of them send out excerpt’s rather than the full text. Something that bugs me a bit.

So I decided to find a way of aggregating the rss data I want into a single feed, to remove duplicates and give me full text and photos of the news. So here’s how I did it.

1. Find the feeds you want http://g7kse.co.uk/feed (for a bit of shameless promotion)

2. See if the feed is chopped off by looking at the content. If its short all the time then chances are it is. Mine isn’t but many are

3. If it is, head on over to FullTextRSSFeed and plonk int the URL and let it do its thing

4. Login / Sign into yahoo to get to Yahoo Pipes

5. Pinch my pipe and make it work for you. They are fairly self explanatory and much underused. Replace the URL’s with yours. Run the pipe and get the RSS feed from that

6. Run the pipe and get the rss output (highlighted) and you should see something like this. The full URL is written there, bit of a mouthful. I tried to shorten it to something a bit more catchy and it didn’t work so just use the link above.

There seems to be more efficient ways of doing this but this method seems to work well enough for me. I’m sure there will be some aspects that don’t work for everyone, I’m not a developer so basically I don’t really know what I’m doing and this is the result of my fumbling about. I do hate it when computers don’t do the things I want them to though and spare a thought for my boss who gets a full rant every now and again when there isn’t a button to press to do a computers job !

Do you Google+ ?

After an initial flurry on interest in Google+ I couldn’t quite decide what it was for. Like many people I keep contact with friends and family on facebook and it servers a purpose, I can’t say I actually like the platform but it does keep me in contact. Google+ is a similar swervice but for a while I couldn’t understand what it was actually for. If nobody I knew was on it then what use is it to me?

Over the past few months a number of different additions have been made to it. There are now communities that seem to be well populated including several for Ham radio.

Again I wasn’t really sure how these things would benefit me, especially as time seems to disappear very quickly at the moment. But yesterday it struck me that you get out what you put in. Not exactly innovative thinking but I posted a question on one community and was pleasantly surprised to see the responses came quickly and they were relevant. Having tested the water I think its time I used it a bit more, not just a personal news service from various blogs and sites now that Google Reader is going to be shut down.

So if you fancy dipping a toe into the various communities I can recommend it. I struggle to actually explain what the service is but as a geek I’ve found it useful in keeping myself up to date with my interests.