Google has their 20% free time. At Superfeedr, we use weekends, or flights.
This weekend has been pretty productive, we two open sourced projects.
Superpipes
It’s a rather frequent question from new users: what’s the difference between Superfeedr and Yahoo Pipes? It’s not that easy to explain, but (at least for the feeds part), Superfeedr can be used to build something like Yahoo Pipes, and that’s what we did.
The little app we built, called Superpipes aggregates feeds in realtime, but also transforms them. It’s really simple to configure, deploy, but also hack on. It’s using node.js, express, redis, heroku, and of course, Superfeedr.
Follow the instructions if you’d like to deploy your own instance and start aggregating!
Feediscovery with node.
We sincerely love what we call community webservices. They are webservices that provide a simple feature that every developer could just implement themselves, but which are also so much more efficient if everybody shares them. Providing the favicon for any url is an example. We built feediscovery to extract urls from a url (and we’re working on that to support webfinger too!).
Now, web services are not always easy to integrate in actual apps: you have to use and HTTP library, JSON parsers… etc. Sometimes I wish I could just type google('keyord', function(err, results) { ... }); and get the results yielded, so we built node-feediscovery, and you can use it exactly like that: feediscovery('url', function(err, links) { .. });.
What’s your latest weekend project?
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