Don Tai (Canada) Blog

Regex is an acquired taste: initially bewildering and bitter, but given time it grows on you. Eventually you begin to appreciate its bouquet. Small, efficient, and powerful, Regex epitomizes good code. This is an advanced discussion of Regex I have found useful in Pipes. If you are new to either, then read up and play.

Other reference material includes Regular Expressions in Yahoo Pipes, but is a tad dated. The Pipes forum is very helpful, especially hapdaniel.

The RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Logo. RSS is so useful but abused.

Should not an internet feature with the label “Really Simple” in its name, be in fact really simple? After working with Really Simple Syndication (RSS), unfortunately this is not or is no longer true. In fact wider variations of this very useful tool threaten to reduce the effectiveness of this useful tool.

Wikipedia has a great definition of RSS:

On Dontai.com I scan the world for RSS (Really Simple Syndication) blog and news feeds that deal with China and Japan. These RSS feeds are funneled into categories for me to read. Sometimes certain RSS feeds misbehave and therefore need to be deleted. One particularly annoying issue is an RSS feed that continues to show up as “most recent”, even when the article is obviously older. When these feeds show up as most recent they clog the news feed, pushing down more recent articles to a lower ranking. This is most annoying.

Drupal 6's Feed Aggregator works well

I really love Drupal 6’s feed aggregator. It has the ability to aggregate numerous RSS (Really Simple Sybndication) news or blog feeds, categorize them, and keep them current, all in the effort to save you the trouble of going to each news source and hunting for relevant news. All you have to do is chose a category, read the summary and click the link for the article you what you want.

I‘ve now spent some time playing with Yahoo Pipes. Now I have a couple of great Pipes that aggregate and filter worldwide sources for news on China and Japan. As well I have also found a huge number of blogs about China. They are all aggregated on my website DonTai.com. To put all these worldwide sources, filtered by keyword, into one simple web page, for each a linked title and a small description, is great. It saves so much time. You read the title and the small description and you decide to delve in deeper or to pass. It is brilliant.

Overwhelming is an understatement when I describe available news on the Internet. Just get on Google’s news section and search for something. If it is anything remotely general, mountains of pages of links will topple out of your monitor and cascade onto your head like a pile of bricks. You then grit your teeth and dig your way out.