Last weekend it was time for the third Barcamp here in London, a.k.a. BarcampLondon3. The location was the beautiful Google Office in London and the organization was brilliant (thank you Ian!). Besides all the nice food, the games of Werewolf, and riding the Google Segway, we also had some moments to present our talks. I actually knew what to present before I went, which made it easier to follow some of the other talks going on without the need to build on my own presentation.

At BarcampBerlin2 I had spoken about Yahoo Pipes and noticed that not too many people knew about Yahoo Pipes at all. Many people that had missed my talk there happened to be attending the Barcamp in London and so I decided to hold the same talk, but presenting it is as more of a walk-through/hints-and-tips session. It turned out to become quite an interesting session, with people ranging from newbies on the topic to people like Ian Forrester that I had a discussion with on the practical uses of Pipes and what was needed to make it realy handy as a tool for commercial developers.

Click To Play

I don’t have slides except for these here which I used at Barcamp Berlin, but lucky for you Tom Morris has recorded my talk on video. The quality is not brilliant and sadly you can’t see what is on the screen, but if you use my previous post on Yahoo Pipes and the slideshow as a reference I think it can be interesting to watch.

This article was originally posted on 23 November 2007 on Cristiano’s own blog. This article is technical but not necessarily complete on the details, keep that in mind. Further more, this article served as the basis for Cristiano’s BarcampLondon3 talk.

So, as you might have noticed I build my own little copy of a Lifestream, much like Jeremy Keith (Adactio) did on his website. Although it is fun to build a lifestream, it isn’t the simplest thing to do, so I took a different approach to use mine and build one using Yahoo Pipes.

The cool thing of using Yahoo Pipes is that my Lifestream is all Javascript+HTML and no server side logic (a.k.a. PHP). I gave a little talk during BarcampBerlin2 explaining what I did, but in the next few paragraphs I will hopefully explain with a bit more detail how it was exactly done, and also focus on some quirks of Yahoo Pipes that I had to work around.

[Next up: Combine Your Blog Posts]