Feedburner is a tool to optimize feeds so it is a perfect tool to use to make our Pipes feed more robust. It does this by letting you assign your own name to the feed, but also by styling the feed for display in web browsers, making it easily consumed by just about any feed reader, and providing an array of subscription management and monitoring options.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/sul/chempubs
Continue reading More on Scopus RSS talk : Part 3. FeedBurner
Yahoo Pipes is, as the site says, “a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.” It uses the idea from Unix of “piping” a series of commands together in a sequence — passing the results from one command to use as the input for the next — but does so using an intuitive graphical user interface. I’ve used Pipes to reformat the feed and remove a few unnecessary branding elements from Scopus. My main objectives were to make the description look more like a citation (albeit incomplete) and to edit the links to Scopus so that they send the user through EZproxy for off-campus access.
The links are no longer IP address dependent, but they are specific to the institution hosting EZproxy. The first link below goes to the Pipes page for the feed I created where I can preview the results of my changes. The second link is to the feed itself.
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=gket7SkL3RGuUHXSy6ky6g
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=gket7SkL3RGuUHXSy6ky6g&_render=rss
Continue reading More on Scopus RSS talk : Part 2. Yahoo Pipes
Edit: The widgets seemed to be interfering with each other so I split the original post up so that each widget displayed on its own page.
As I mentioned in my UNYSL talk last week, I am repurposing a search that I ran in Scopus, Elsevier’s science citation database, to generate a list of newly published articles by chemistry researchers at Syracuse University. Scopus offers a custom RSS alert option for every search you perform. I won’t repeat the steps I had to make to get it to work well — see the slides for that.
Here is the url for the RSS feed from Scopus for the faculty publication search. The url is ugly but functional and it reliably brings in the results I designed it for. As is, it can be sent to just about any RSS feed reader without any problem.
http://syndic8.scopus.com/getMessage?registrationId=EAHEFDPEFCHMMBLJGAHMFAHHFAIFIEKMGSJSTEHLIT
However, what I want to do is figure out a way to display it directly on my web site. It really isn’t difficult to display RSS feeds directly on a webpage. However, unless you are running your own server-side program, you will probably use some sort of third-party widget that you can embed on your page. Widgets of this sort use javascript or Flash or some combination of the two. You embed code stating the location of the widget and then tell the widget which RSS feed it should use, and it does the rest.
I’m giving a presentation this afternoon at the 2008 Upstate New York Science Librarians (UNYSL) meeting on “Creating Faculty Publication Lists from Scopus RSS Feeds”, in which I’ll do a short demonstration of transforming a search feed from Elsevier’s citation database, Scopus, into an on-the-fly publication “list” that can be embedded on a webpage. The technologies that I’m using include
My example in the presentation is, more-or-less, the “New Faculty Publications” widget that I’m using on my Chemistry Resources page. That widget is further enhanced from what I’ll be showing in this afternoon’s talk in that it also includes subscription by email and an RSS subscription chicklet, both from FeedBurner.
I’m making my presentation slides and notes available at SlideShare (download or see below) and I’m also sharing the 2-page PDF of my talk overview handout.