I've long wanted to be able to automatically import feeds from other posters' blogs (hence the little-used "On Our Blogs" category) directly into Ish. There are a few MT plugins that are supposed to do that, but I couldn't seem to get anything to work. So I tried Pipes, the mash-your-own-feed service from Yahoo! Check out the results over on the sidebar. Boring "how it works" stuff below the fold.

Pipes is pretty neat -- I can even take the feed from Sepia Mutniy and filter it to just import Ennis' posts. However it wasn't doing quite what I wanted it to do, namely to just output an excerpt of the post. One solution was to ditch the excerpt and just use the title, but because of the way Idolator outputs its RSS feeds (namely, by wrapping the content in a <![CDATA[ ) I couldn't eliminate the description field. Fortunately, Pipes lets you do a lot of fiddling with the data; unfortunately, it required more Regex chops than I possess. After much searching around (surely there must be someone else who's tried to do this?) I turned to the experts over at RegexAdvice who helpfully provided a solution. (Thanks, Regexperts!)

You can see the results here, and this is what's going on under the hood. Basically the steps it is taking are:

1) Grab each feed.
2) Use a regex to prepend the post title with the poster's handle (this idea taken from Lifehacker).
3) Use another regex to strip out the HTML from the description.
4) Throw all the feeds together.
5) Sort by date descending, throw out all but the most recent 5 posts.
6) Copy the description field into a temporary holding field called, wittily, description_holding.
7) Excerpt the first twenty words. The Regex is replace (?s)^((?:\S+\s*){20}).*$ with $1...
(Roughly translated, that puts the first 20 words into a var $1 and the rest into var $2, then replaces the whole field with $1 and an ellipsis.)
8) Overwrite the old description with the excerpt in description_field.
9) Output!

Then it's just a matter of dropping a widget into the sidebar. Huzzah!

It is also indexed under: Aggregators | Feeds | Regex | Yahoo! | Yahoo! Pipes

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