Using the Plings RSS Feeds - Output API

[David Carpenter]

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).

Interested to know if this is of any use and/or any interest to
anyone!

Cheers
David