Seattle Outtakes Pipe

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This entry was published at least two years ago (originally posted on August 1, 2007). Since that time the information may have become outdated or my beliefs may have changed (in general, assume a more open and liberal current viewpoint). A fuller disclaimer is available.

Update: PI staffer Mike Thompson let me know that they’ve just enabled RSS feeds for each individual category within the Big Blog. Each category page (like this one for Seattle Outtakes, for instance) now has an RSS link right at the top of the page. Thanks, Mike!

For some time now, I’ve been following the Seattle Outtakes blog from the PI, where PI photographers would post and discuss images that didn’t make the final cut into the paper for one reason or another (and some photos that were published), along with how they got the shot, techniques, and so on. Really good stuff for a photo bug.

Sadly, Outtakes has now been absorbed into The Big Blog, the PI’s latest addition to their ever-growing linup of weblogs. I’m not sure quite why they made this decision, but I found it rather annoying. As I posted in a comment on their announcement post:

One more vote for keeping Outtakes separate — I watch this one precisely because of my interest in photography, and have really enjoyed the insights into what the PI photographers do. The Big Blog feels too unfocused in tone and too similar to too many other local ‘catchall’ blogs, and it not something I’m likely to check in with regularly…which ends up meaning no Outtakes for me. Pity.

While you can manually check the Outtakes category on The Big Blog, there’s no category-specific RSS feed provided, and there’s just way too much traffic that I’m not terribly interested in for me to bother subscribing to the RSS feed (and even if I did feel like subscribing, it appears to be an excerpts-only feed instead of a full-text feed — one more reason for me not to subscribe).

So…Yahoo Pipes to the (theoretical) rescue. I’ve not actually played with Yahoo Pipes before, but given that it allows you to perform various operations on web data, it seemed like it might be a good potential tool for attempting to regain my Outtakes fix. In theory, if I’ve done this correctly, this pipe should be a Seattle Outtakes RSS feed.

However: I don’t actually know if it’s working correctly yet, and I’m not sure how soon I will…and there’s some potential down-the-road issues with the pipe. Geeky details under the cut…

Here’s what the pipe is doing (it’s pretty simple):

  1. Grab The Big Blog’s RSS feed.
  2. Filter out all entries that are not written by one of the known PI photographers that contributed to Seattle Outtakes.
  3. Output an RSS feed that only contains Outtakes posts.

Here’s the current known issues:

  1. The Big Blog’s RSS feed only gives the most recent ten items posted to the blog. Considering there have been sixteen posts so far today, that seems a little light to me, but hey, they didn’t ask me. At the moment, there are no Outtakes posts within those ten items, so even if the Pipe is working correctly, it doesn’t have any Outtakes data to work with, so it’s currently returning an empty feed. Given the current data set, an empty feed is the expected output so the pipe might be working correctly — or it might be buggy and not working. I won’t know until one of the Outtakes contributers posts something and it passes through (or doesn’t).

  2. The PI doesn’t list an item’s categories in the RSS feed, so I can’t simply scan for all entries in the Outtakes category. Because of this, I have to filter by author. Obviously, this can cause issues, as I can only plug in the names of photographers listed on the Outtakes sidebar. If any non-listed photographer contributes to the Outtakes category, my pipe will miss it. Also, if any of the listed photographers contribute to any other category in The Big Blog, my pipe will pass it through. Currently listed photographers whose posts will appear are as follows:

    • Andy Rogers
    • Gilbert Arias
    • Grant Haller
    • Joshua Trujillo
    • Karen Ducey
    • Meryl Schenker
    • Mike Urban
    • Rob Sumner

This entire situation is goofy, and I’m not very happy with the PI’s current blog system. While a catchall mess of eclecticism works well for a personal weblog that’s updated anywhere from once or twice a day to once or twice a month (like, oh, this one, perhaps), it doesn’t work well for a high-volume weblog run by a daily newspaper. Meh. Go back to individual, focused, compartmentalized blogs! This Big Blog is little more than a Big Mess.