Gather information together using Yahoo Pipes

Recently, -indeed, almost one month ago- I have been looking for a service that can mix all of my blogs' feeds together so that readers can only subscribe to it and no need to worry about missing a post on one of them.

After, trying several disappointed services, I came across the Yahoo Pipes. Indeed, it is such a good service that it can be very useful for you. By using this tool, you can gather, filter and sort any information on the web.

Well, here in my IT blog I discuss how i used it to combine the blog posts that I write in several blog sites. I think you should give it a try.

A simple application of Yahoo Pipes

Today, I am gonna talk about a very useful service offered by Yahoo that makes your internet experience better than before.

The service is called as Yahoo Pipes. The service is a very good tool for users who want to get information within different resources on the web. You can gather, filter and sort –and possible more- the information from different sources and publish this information with different ways.

I suggest you to go to the site and play a little bit and you will grasp the details of the service and learn how it can be used for your convenience.

Here, I want to discuss how Yahoo pipes saves a lot of time for me and my readers. As you all know, I have been writing different blogs. And if any one of my reader wants to check whether I post a new message, it should revisit the site or subscribe for each blog's feeds. However, by using Yahoo Pipes, I combined the feeds of my blogs together, so from now on, everyone can get updates of my blog post just subscribing this newly created feed.

Let's see how I managed to do that.

When you visit pipes.yahoo.com and log on using your Yahoo ID, you see a link of "create a new pipe". Here from there, you can begin constructing your pipe.

Below, you see the graphical representation of my pipe.

As you can see there are four components of it:

Fetch Feed: This object can be added from Sources from left pane. After adding this object, I start adding my URLs of my blogs' feeds. That is just all.

Filter: This object is used for filtering the information. It can be reached from Operators category from left pane. Here, there is a very simple rule which tells that only the author of the item.author.name attribute containing Sinan can be permitted to go through this filter.

Sort: This is another object form Operators that is used for sorting. Here in my case, all of the items are sorted by item.pubDate in Descending Order. This means that all of my blog posts will be resorted by the newest at the top.

Pipe output: This is the final object that is to sell that pipe should give some output. When you click on it, you see the output of your pipe in the pane at the bottom.

Finally, I saved the pipe and published it using the buttons on the top right. Now, everyone can see the output of my pipe by going to the URL provided by Yahoo Pipes.

Notice that I also used FeedBurner to fetch this newly created feed in order to see the statistics of user activity. But it is totally different story and the service is not related to Yahoo Pipes. You can get information about how to integrate FeedBurner to your Blogger blogs from my another blog post.

That's all.

How much would you pay before marrying an investment banker?

Recently, I read an interesting article in which a divorce lawyer named Jeremy Levison warns the bankers that "Don't get married. If you must, make sure your other half is as rich as you."

As provocative as it sounds, the articles then looks at the underlying claims that make this warning a legitimite one. One of the cleverest guys in pricing complex securities makes an analysis of the situation and he concludes that "you might expect to see $187,500 to $375,000 being invested toward getting a junior banker to the altar".

Of course, this is for those of people who works in Wall Street or London. Maybe the situation in Turkey might be more different but here I want to address Turkish girls that it might be a good investments for you to find a guy who wants to work as a investment bankers or traders.

The Economist’s perspectives on Turkish presidency

The political climate in Turkey matters a lot for us. Moreover, the outsiders are also watching carefully what is happening in Turkey. Here, I want to highlight a few important points that I found in this article of the Economist.

Firstly, the magazine believes that what has been done in recent four and a half year was a quite success for the country and no other administration has achieved to the same over half a century:

Mr Erdogan's government has been Turkey's most successful in half a century. After years of macroeconomic instability, growth has been steady and strong, inflation has been controlled and foreign investment has shot up. Even more impressive are the judicial and constitutional reforms that the AK government has pushed through. Corruption remains a blemish, but there is no sign of the government trying to overturn Turkey's secular order. The record amply justifies Mr Erdogan's biggest achievement: to persuade the EU to open membership talks, over 40 years after a much less impressive Turkey first expressed its wish to join.

Then, the article gives an interesting perspective about what might me helpful to the army's recent sortie. It declares that recent rise of the opposition of Turkey's entry to the EU may have led to the army to be more confident of hampering the government's deeds:

But the perception in the country that so many current members are against it matters, for it reduces the EU's influence. Were the prospects of EU membership obviously brighter, the army would not have intervened as brutally. As it is, the EU's mild condemnation was shrugged off in Ankara, especially when the Americans said nothing at all. Their influence in Turkey is also much diminished, mainly because the war in Iraq has inflamed anti-American feeling.

As interesting as it sounds, the magazine also recommends that "for the sake of the state they are trying to protect, Turkey's soldiers should stay out of politics". I think that most of you are not unfamiliar with this recommendation. Well, who was the first person to put such a bold measure in the army's internal standing orders?