The Pipes Picayune & Daily Tube is one of several mashed-up news tickers I am working on that use the new Pipes service from Yahoo! to deliver up-to-date data in a dated style.

Headlines from a BBC RSS feed are feed, via Y! Pipes, to my news ticker, which is implemented in Flash. Click on the spinning newspaper to read the story in full on the original website. This widget can work with any RSS feed, but I’m using the BBC because they tend to write short pithy headlines which fit my faux newspapers better.

Here are three Pipes-fed RSS widgets, in different styles. More to come soon…

Your Basic News Ticker

Your Basic News Ticker, in Basic Black

The Wheel of Lunch (uses Yahoo Local)

The Pipes Picayune and Daily Tube

Technical Notes for you geeks:

Any of these widgets can be included in your blog by visiting this form and copying the code it generates. If your blog is extremely high traffic you might want to copy the .swf file and iframe source code and host it yourself.

One of the nice things about using Yahoo Pipes is that there is no need for me to use or implement a proxy, which makes it easy for me to make and share these widgets with other people who want to use them on their websites and blogs. The reason there is no need for a proxy is because Pipes can optionally deliver the data in JSON format. By including the JSON data as a javascript include, I can bypass the usual (and needlessly restrictive, in my opinion) cross-browser restrictions that prevent client-side web applications from retrieving XML data from 3rd party websites.

Feel free to examine the source code of this page to get a better understanding of how the data is retrieved and fed to the Flash widget. Source code for my basic news ticker can be found here.

Note: Many thanks to Yahoo’s Kent Brewster, who clued me in to the use of JSON to bypass proxy restrictions. The news tickers are using the pipe that feeds Kent’s “Badger” system.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 22nd, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Jim's Projects, Linkydinks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.