Posts tagged friendfeed

escaloop in 2009

The short story is: not going to happen.

I’ll be shutting escaloop down in about a month or so. It was a nice toy and a fun experiment, I’ve used it to get into Ramaze, but I have neither the time nor the energy to work on it any further.

I recommend moving over to FriendFeed or Lifestream.fm for all your lifestream needs. I am sure there are many more such services, just look around. :)

If you should choose FriendFeed, look me up if you want.

Using Yahoo! Pipes: Your Most Recent Nike+ Run in Friendfeed

During the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of pipes I want to share. (“Pipe”, in this context, means an application built in Yahoo! Pipes.)

Here’s one of them.

Your Most Recent Nike+ Run

As I’ve mentioned once or twice in the past, I’ve become a more or less avid runner during the last year. One central piece of my equipment is my Nike+. I don’t run without it. I am a geek, I love numbers. The Nike+ provides me with numbers. It makes running a game.

I sync my iPod with my iTunes after each run, and the Nike site is taking the raw data, crunching it, giving me graphs and more numbers, and (this is the interesting thing) badges for my website.

Now, I don’t really care about those. But when there are badges, there must be an API which provides the raw data to them. Looking behind the scenes, I quickly found it. It’s not password-protected or secured in any way; when you set your nikeplus.nike.com profile to “public”, the API will return some of your data (run overviews, run details etc. — no personal details).

So, knowing the API URL, I’ve built a pipe which will do a few things:

  1. Accept any nikeplus.nike.com “brag”-type of link as parameter (when you’re logged in to the site, these are usually labelled “Share with your friends”, “Grab the link” etc.).
  2. It will extract your public, numeric runner ID from this link.
  3. It’ll fetch the data for the most recent run of the runner with this ID, i.e. you.
  4. It’ll build an RSS feed with the data of your most recent run.

When writing the pipe, I’ve made a few assumptions, namely that…

  • you sync your iPod after each run
  • you’re using the Nike+ site
  • you don’t run more than once per day.

Since I am lazy, I’ll only use the data for the most recent run, so the pipe’s results will be exactly that — just a single item, your most recent run.

That being said, I found this sufficient. After adding the pipe’s RSS URL as new “Custom RSS”-type service to Friendfeed, FF will effectively trigger the pipe a few times each day, and your latest run will be added to your stream quickly. Next time you sync your iPod, the Nike site will pick up the new data, the API will return the new data to the pipe, and the new run will be added as new Friendfeed item.

The pipe will post your runs in the following format: “[Nike+ runner name] ran [distance] [km/mi] in [time]”, for example “3R ran 11.3543 km in 1:03’54””. The message will link to the public page of the run — a page like this. (3R is my Nike+ moniker.)

Now, why would I want to add my runs to Friendfeed? Well, why not? For me, running is a nice part of my life. I’m actually enjoying it, I’m keeping it casual, and I am proud of every damn kilometer mark I pass. Plus, as mentioned, I am a geek, and I like to share what I build. :)

If you have questions or suggestions, speak your mind in the comments.

Using Yahoo! Pipes: Steam Achievements in Friendfeed

During the last few weeks, I’ve built a couple of pipes I want to share. (“Pipe”, in this context, means an application built in Yahoo! Pipes.)

Here’s one of them.

Steam Achievements

A few weeks ago, I’ve first tested and then bought the excellent CrossOver Games. It’s an emulator (basically a highly specialized version of WINE) which allows me to play a slate of Windows games, old and new, under OSX. So, that’s how I’ve spent big chunks of my spare time during the last few weeks: playing through the wonderful Portal and the great Half-Life 2 games. (On a related note, I’ve noticed the World of Goo demo is running flawlessly in CXG. Awesome!)

I’ve got the games via Steam, and was both delighted and highly annoyed to learn that newer Steam games offer achievements. You see, I am a sucker for achievements. I love them, even though they aren’t good for anything. I usually spend too much time trying to get this or that achievement. These meaningless little pixel badges are “awarded” for different things you manage to do in different games. You can get achievements in various games, on various platforms. For example on Xbox Live, or, as mentioned, on Steam.

So, being a male gamer in his mid-30s, I naturally like to use these superfluous thingies to brag about my mediocre gaming skills. Meaning, I want them to show up on my Friendfeed profile.

Thus, I wrote a pipe which grabs the achievements from any (public) Steam ID page (here’s mine), spitting them out in an usable format — in Friendfeed’s case, that’d be RSS. (Pipes also returns the data as JSON if you want, or even as a handy HTML badge you can put on your blog or whereever.)

I’ve then added the RSS URL of the finished pipe as new service (type: “Blog”1) to Friendfeed.

So, that’s all there is to it. Maybe I am the only one caring about this type of thing, maybe not. If you have questions or suggestions, sound off in the comments. :)

  1. Friendfeed’s terminology is a bit misleading here… If you want to add an RSS feed, you’ll have to use “Blog” as new service. Eh. ↩

Pleasant Memories Of Times Past

Trying to keep track of the last one or two weeks…

  • Running again! Avoiding tarmac, thank God there are many forest roads around. Using light weights on my hands now, too. Fun. The most interesting part of the down period was that I was actually missing my runs, and that I was looking forward to start running again. I think it’s official: I like it.
  • Found out I can watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart & The Colbert Report freely and legally on the web,OMG. Thank you, Comedy Central. Too bad there isn’t an RSS feed. Or is there?
  • Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo! – and so is JR Conlin. Bummer, two of my personal heroes gone. Well, I guess ~9 years at the same company is enough for anyone. All the best, guys!
  • Using FriendFeed now. It’s not bad, really; then again, I mostly use it to have a single place where all my loose threads come together. I really like the stalking helper imaginary friends feature. Makes it easy to keep track of pals who don’t use FriendFeed themselves. I’ve tried subscribing to the combined feed of all the people I’ve subscribed to on the site, but it’s like being fed by a firehose. Unusable, sorry. As I’ve said before, the idea to build a social network on top of peoples’ lifestreams is a bit too meta for me.
  • Discovered Goodreads. Nice.
  • I love GTA IV. Incredible game. So many lovingly crafted details, amazing.
  • New iPhones! Dope. Want. And a revamped .mac! Let’s hope it works as good as it looks in the presentations. The current .mac web implementation is useless for me. It just doesn’t cut it.