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The power of RSS

Submitted by jay on October 31, 2008 - 2:24pm

Thanks a ton to Xarb who reminded me of pipes in his blog post about filtering out fluffy planet mysql authors.


I should remember Pipes, since I work at Yahoo and I was called in to help out with their DB that first full day they were launched and couldn't handle the traffic, but hey, sometimes things just don't come to mind.

Anywho, taking Xarb's inspiration, I've been annoyed by the blogs that appear both in planetmysql and planetdrizzle.  (Not by their content, just by their duplicity in my RSS reader)  Using Xarb's pipe, I quickly cloned it and added a union and a unique filter based on the url of the post to remove the dups.  It's published for use here.   Programming should always be so easy.  

Speaking of RSS feeds and being a U.S Citizen (and to completely change the topic)  I've been poking around looking for information on who is going to be on my ballot come Tuesday, and I've found some decent sites that are trying to save U.S. democracy by opening it up.  Here's a few that I've found:

www.vote-ny.org (obviously for NY citizens)
www.votesmart.org

Votesmart has a RSS feed (just one, unfortunately) of recent votes in the Congress, which I promptly subscribed to.  

However, taking it a step further, I'd love a site that would take that information, cross-reference it with the list of my representatives, and show me how they voted on each issue.  

Next, I want a way to rank or flag issues or bills that are important to me as they happen.  Most logically this would be some through an rss feed of some kind. Oh, we're voting on Economic packages, flag that for further review.  Oh, my representative voted this way, let me see how they've voted on similar issues in the past and flag that as a concern for me in the next election.  

Anyway, this is a pure Friday-afternoon-doped-up-on-cough-syrup-forgot-how-cool-pipes-is-rant-and-wishing-I-had-the-time-to-build-a-website-to-save-my-country post.


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BTW, for anyone interested, I

BTW, for anyone interested, I updated my mysql/drizzle pipe to copy the dc:creator field into the author field.  This will make the author of the post show up correctly in Google Reader, and possibly some other RSS readers.  

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