Comments on: A simple perl script to interrogate the Technorati API

By: Malise

Malise — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 22:01:11 +0000

i just wanted to say that I love this site

By: The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe | Mediaczar

The Technorati Authority Yahoo! Pipe | Mediaczar — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:03:44 +0000

[...] Over the holidays, I started playing with a new Yahoo! pipe to pull information from Technorati into a spreadsheet. The reasons why I wanted to do this are covered in this post about the quantitative analysis of blogs, and my eventual perl-based solution to the problem is covered in this post. [...]

By: Bob B.

Bob B. — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 18:09:32 +0000

Mat,

Using a
worked. Excellent! Thanks for the tip.

By: Blogger typology: quantitative analysis step 1 | Mediaczar

Blogger typology: quantitative analysis step 1 | Mediaczar — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 20:06:39 +0000

[...] iFAQ « A simple perl script to interrogate the Technorati API [...]

By: Mat Morrison

Mat Morrison — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:07:35 +0000

@themetz - the perl and Excel stuff I make myself in the evenings and weekends. Lackeys do the complicated stuff like Java. Actually - my team at Porter Novelli are getting really good at doing this stuff themselves. Part of why I'm doing more of this stuff is so that I can keep just far enough ahead of them that they don't overtake me! The web really helps, of course. In the old days, someone with limited coding abilities like myself would have to give up when faced by complicated problems (or buy a reference book, which is often the same thing, I find.) These days, Google and the forums help you solve most things; it's rare that we find that we're the first person to have discovered a problem; most times we find that someone has trodden the path before and a solution (or solutions) have been provided. Part of the purpose of this blog is to share stuff back into the community that I will have patched together from other people's work!

By: Mat Morrison

Mat Morrison — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:03:19 +0000

@Bob B. Thank you so much – I love what you’ve done with the Pipe. The string builder is a v. smart way around the problem. It looks to me like you can add “
” or “

” in place of the “–”, although I’d consider commas as well. In an ideal world I’ll take the data into Google Docs at the end of the process.

Interestingly I’d already come across (and bookmarked) your Top Keywords – Yahoo Pipes post; it helped me solve one of the early problems I’d faced (back when my Pipe was actually working.)

One of the problems I stumbled into (and which I still don’t understand) was the sudden and unexpected failure of Pipes to retrieve my CSV file. Every version I’d used up till then had worked, then – out of nowhere – it stopped working. Cloning the pipe didn’t “reboot”. When I started again from a fresh canvas it fetched the pipes, but couldn’t build the URLs.

I know pipes is a bit beta-y sometimes, but this was just frustrating. Stuff that had worked stopped working. Gah!

Will take a clone of your pipe, if that’s OK, and give you full recognition and links on the new post. Am so pleased. Pipes is a far better tool for sharing with others than the perl script.

By: Adam Metz

Adam Metz — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 08:17:32 +0000

Mat, did you hand-code this stuff yourself, or did your lackeys do it? Good stuff, man.

By: Bob B.

Bob B. — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:36:52 +0000

I’ve created a small pipe that outputs what you want in the form of an RSS feed. It’s published here: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=OgntVi3a3RG6XTW_1L3fcQ. I haven’t quite figured out how to do line breaks in pipes yet so I’ve separated the data with a double dash. I’ve been playing with pipes a lot lately. I explain a few others at semdevel.com.