Thursday, May 7

Mashups and ACS Events

Recently I have been playing around with free online mash-up tools like dapper, Yahoo pipes, twitter feed etc.

I used them to create a rss feed for upcoming Australian Computer Society events and Young IT Events.

Using the tools was remarkability easy. I created a extraction engine in dapper by clicking on elements of the ACS Website while it was loaded into the dapper webapp and entering descriptions of the selected elements. I reused the engine by pointing it at several similar webpages. I then used Y! Pipes to join the information together into one feed.

The ACS is revamping its website with a improved look in July 2009 with a total replacement of the website in coming in 2010.

Also ACS has come out with a twitter news feed.

RSS Feeds mentioned:

Update August 2009

Event RSS feeds and news RSS were suppose to be added in the July 2009 website upgrade. I thought that these feeds will probably not be useful after that. However they still work fine. Since this was first published I have used this technique with the AIIA, AIPM and Churchill Club websites as well.

There have also been some new ACS twitter accounts set up.

New RSS Feeds