Plings and RSS Feeds

The Plings Output API provides access to all the activities in the Plings datastore. You need an API Key to get at the full XML data (get in touch if you would like one), but the iCal, KML and RSS feeds of activities are open to anyone to use.

RSS is a particularly powerful tool for get updated information fed right across the web – and it’s something we’ve been exploring a lot in the Networked Participation Action Learning Set. To help explain the power of RSS I put together the presentation below:

Plings is one of those tools that produces RSS. Of course, it’s not sharing articles, but activities – and as David recently reminded the Plings developers e-mail list – that means thinking slightly differently about how you use it:

The Plings RSS feeds that come out of the API, have a link back to the ‘Activity Title’ in them. Currently this takes you to a pretty ugly page at something like (e.g.)

http://www.plings.net/index.php/a/114576

It’s worth remembering that the RSS feeds we supply are not really as you might expect RSS to be, but more just a way to transfer data (i.e. they tell you all the data we have for a particular day, not when new activities have been added)

There are lots of tools out there that will accept our RSS feeds and show (e.g.) today’s Plings (perhaps in a Wordpress Blog for example)

You might then want to manipulate that feed to do certain things for you…

By making use of Yahoo Pipes, here’s a quick example (it took about 5 mins) that:

a) only shows Plings to come (i.e.gets rid of anything that started over an hour ago (I think!))

b) re-writes the url, so that anyone clicking on an activity title is take to a preferred site to see more info. (in the example we change ‘http://www.plings.net/index.php/a/’ to ‘http://stockport.placestogothingstodo.co.uk/Activity.aspx?id=’)

http://pipes.yahoo.com/plings/rss_with_rewrite_links

If you are parsing your own data, of course you can do all this yourself, but just thought this was really nice! You can also clone this and other pipes and see what you can come up with.

A while ago we made this one:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/plings/skplingsooon

to try to show plings in the next hour (we then plugged it into a twitter account using Twitterfeed). Using pipes and the Plings Output API you could easily filter this to display just a particular sort of activity instead – and, for example, feature upcoming dance sessions in Stockport on your own Twitter account or blog.