Today, afer a few teething problems I have managed to successfully get a Yahoo Pipe working on my blog which feeds through the latest football news from a variety of sources including Yahoo, Google and Sky Sports. To do this, first of all I visited the site pipes.yahoo.com. Then I clicked on create a pipe. This takes you to the pipe creation page. On here I then dragged on the fetch feed source onto the creation area. I entered the URL of the sites that I wanted to draw the information into my feed from (Sky Sports, Google etc).

Once I had done this  then dragged and dropped a filter box from the Options drop down menu. I entered in her the filters that I wanted. This allows the pipe to only feed through to my site the information I require, which in this case is Football and Leeds United. I linked the Fetch Feed box to the Filter box facility.

Once I had entered this information into the filter I then linked the filter box to the ‘Pipe Output’ box. Here is a screen shot of what a pipe looks like:

When I had finished linking the pipe sections I then saved my pipe as Footy Latest. Then I went into the properties section and added the relevant details such as Pipe title, description, tags etc. I then hit the publish button, which took me to the screen which produced the URL i needed to copy.

I went back onto my Wordpress dashboard/presentation/widgets. I then dragged an RSS widget onto my sidebar so that my Football Latest Feed would display on my blog. Finally I hit the settings configuration option on the RSS widget and firstly pasted the Yahoo Pipe URL into the relevent box and configured the widget so that it would show a maximum of 5 latest football news stories in my side bar.

Although this sounds like a long winded process, it was in fact fairly simple to do, and now I have the latest news in on the beautiful game fed through directly onto my site. All it took was a bit of patience and a quick viewing of a Yahoo Pipe video tutorial on Youtube and Bob’s your Uncle.

Now that we all seem to be getting to grips with all this social networking, blogging  stuff, my Final Project Group (Chris, Tom and myself) are going to create another blog to run alongside the website and print advert campaign we are working on for our final project - the Pocket Wellies product launch. I can’t tell you too much about our project at the moment but here is a sneeky preview our our logo, designed by yours truely:

I have learned through this module, and also from a work placement at a marketing and pr agency last year that social networking such as creating a blog for a business is an excellent marketing and pr opportunity as it allows the company to tap into Google searches for free publicity, simply through daily commenting on all things news and sport, company plans and events, youtube videos etc, and then tagging the blog entries.

I will add our final project blog to my De.Licio.Us widget or blogroll when it is up and running…

I activated my google widget, which is meant to search my site i.e. type in video and it should find my videos I uploaded. However this did not happen. Instead it took you to this screen:

I therefore decided to remove this widget as it is only taking up unnecessary space on my already buldging sidebar.

Do you know what, I might just be getting the hang of the ftp blogging thing malarky. I’ve just downloaded another really useful widget pack from the web page http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widgets/ once this is added to your site you can upload and activate numerous new widgets including Del.icio.us and google widgets. I am going to check out the google widget in a few minutes.

I love it that I finally know what I’m doing!!!