Yahoo Pipes and Zapier

I have been trying to get this blog updated weekly or bi-weekly, but my schedules at UT Arlington and Dakota State have not afforded me much time. I did manage to come up with a nice little combination of services to solve a problem the other day.

If you are looking for a quick and easy method for content delivery, do not forget Yahoo! Pipes. I am grabbing and parsing information from Pipes and feeding that to Zapier for quick email delivery. Although the documentation for pipes could be somewhat more inclusive and more detailed, like say a regular language reference, it's enough to get the idea and testing phases completed.

Zapier is amazing stuff. What I'm most interested in with Zapier is the ability to integrate ticket items into service suites for technology help desk collaboration softwares. The real strength lies there in my humble opinion.

In addition I will also say that it would be nice to have some integration to more traditional suites like Microsoft Sharepoint 2010, without having to rely on RSS or Atom feeds, or some others manually created XML.

Side Note: turned several students and at least one GRA on to Mendeley. I love watching their eyes light up and the look of relief when they see what it can do. Also I discovered that Blackboard and YouTube go well together when trying to convey an idea to 200+ students. I cannot imagine how many email I saved myself this week.

Ok that's it for this week. No cool logo, but we will see what next week brings.