Aorta Widget

If you like mashups, you probably will like my new Aorta Widget as well. It displays your life's bloddstream, your Aorta, in the sidebar of your Blog. What is in your Aorta? Your Blogger Blog feed, to begin with. But also your Flickr Photo's, your Picasa Webalbums, and your YouTube Channel.

Easy Installation
Go to the Widget Installation & Downlaods Page, and click the Install Widget to Blog button. This will bring up the Widget Installer, where you can customize the widget before installation.
Enter the full url of your Blogger blog. If you have a Picasa Webalbums account, enter the Picasa username here. If you don't have a Picasa account, leave this field blank. If you have a Flickr account, enter your FlickrID here. Again, if you have no account, leave the field blank. Finally, enter your YouTube username, or leave blank if you have no YouTube presence.
Click Customize, and then Add to my Blog.

Easy Styling
Add custom CSS-classes to your skin. You need .bbaortabox, .bbaortaitem and .bbwidgetfooter.

Pipe Your Plaxo Pulse Into Blogger

Well, I suppose that you know at least one word from this title: Blogger. Then it is time to get acquainted with Plaxo and Yahoo! Pipes. Again, as in many other Widgets I have created, the Widget might be of little practical use. But it has an educational purpose as well: it shows how to mash up datafeeds from different websites, transform them into JSON, so that you can easily pump the data into your Blogger sidebar. So here we go!

Plaxo
Plaxo is a social network service, that you can use to maintain your personal and business networks. Plaxo has been out there for several years now, but the new idea of Plaxo Pulse has given new dimensions to the use of Plaxo. The Pulse lets you share all kind of information with your network. You can add blogfeeds, links, photo's, messages or polls to your Pulse, and share them with your friends, your family, business relations, or with all of them.

Yahoo! Pipes
With Yahoo! Pipes you can convert any feed from any webpage into something else. You can mash up data from different sources, and create your own feed with it.

Piping your Pulse into Blogger
For this new widget I enabled my Personal Pulse Feed in Plaxo. This means that there is a feed containing all 'events' that took place, for example changes in personal information (phonenumber, address, etc.), or links that I added to my Pulse. This feed is a standard RSS-feed, and that is of little use because the widget needs a JSON-formatted feed (I have explained the JSON-concept in another post).
So that is where Yahoo! Pipes come in handy. I created a simple pipe, that picks up the Plaxo Feed Url. The output of this pipe can be retrieved in JSON-format. And my new widget takes that JSON-output as its input.
Relax, it sounds more complicated than it is.

Setting Up Your Plaxo Feed
Assuming you have a Plaxo account, sign in on Plaxo, and select your Pulse.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and click on RSS Feeds. This brings you to the Pulse Stream RSS Feeds page. Here you can see the 5 possible feeds: Everyone, Business Network, Family, Friends, and Me.
Select one of them and click on Enable. The feed will be enabled, and you can copy the Feed Url from the textbox. Copy it to Notepad for now.
This was step 1. Easy, wasn't it?

Creating the Pipe
Assuming you have a Yahoo! account, go to http://pipes.yahoo.com and sign in.
At the top of the page, click on Create a pipe to bring up the Pipe Editor. You will see the empty canvas with the text drag modules here, and several modules to the left side of the canvas. Drag the Fetch Feed-module onto the canvas. Now copy the Plaxo Feed Url from Notepad, and paste it into the url-input box in the Fetch Feed Module. Now connect the Fetch Feed Module to the Pipe Output box. A blue line will appear. Guess what - you have just created your Pipe!
Click on the Pipe Output box to select it. In the Debugger window at the bottom of the screen you will see your Pipe's Output.
Now click the Save-button, and click Back to my pipes.
From this list of pipes, click on your newly created Plaxo Pipe to run it and view its output. At the top-right you will see a small Feed-icon, with the text More options. Click this link to open a small pop-up menu. Right-click on the menu option called Get as JSON and copy the link and save it in Notepad. You will need this JSON-Feed-Url in the next step.
You have now completed step 2.

Installing the Widget
Now it is time to install the widget to your Blog. Go to the Widgets and Downloads Page, and click the Add Plaxo Pulse Widget to my Blog button. This will start the Click-n-Go Installer. In the install-screen, enter the JSON-Feed-Url from your Yahoo Pipe, and set the maximum number of items to display. Click Customize to create the Widget code, and then Add to my Blog to add the Widget to one of your Blogs.

Add some CSS
For your convenience I have added 3 custom CSS classes:

• .bbplaxobox: a wrapper containing the widget


• .bbplaxoitem: the item itself


• .bbwidgetfooter: the widget footer

Add style definitions for these classes to your template's skin.

Your Privacy
As far as I know, sharing the feed only shares the fact that you have added or changed information. The feed will NOT contain the new information. Clicking on a Pulse Item brings the user to the Plaxo Pages. Information is only visible after sign-in, for users who are connected to you.

I hope this has some use, or that it inspires you to delve further into Piping and JSON.