The Journal of Lee Davis-Thalbourne

So, I had a problem. In my never-ending quest to link every social account I have on the internet, I wanted to start publishing my public LJ entries to my Facebook notes. This is simple enough, Facebook gives you what you need to do it (either through RSS or some other LJ voodoo), it's not really difficult at all.

But, as many readers have noted, I don't actually end up with a lot of entries typically. Most of my entries are automagic Twitter digests. These digests are great for LJers who aren't on Twitter, but my Twitter updates already update direct to my Facebook status. So there is really no need for all those digests to get sucked onto my Facebook notes. But LJ's syndication feeds are very low-tech - there's no way to filter it out on LJ's end.

That's when I remembered that a while ago someone had told me about a great little website called Yahoo! Pipes. What Pipes lets you do is take an RSS feed (or a large number of them, for that matter), do almost anything you like with them (filter, union, count, add dates, etc), and then output a new feed that does whatever it is you wanted to do with it, with a neat graphical interface with lots of dragging and connecting which means you don't even have to code a thing. Spiffy, and exactly what I needed!

So, what ended up happening was I made myself a new feed, with all the Twitter Updates sucked out of it, which I could then feed into Facebook's Feed import feature. So, people on Facebook get to look at my LJ posts without having to sort through all the Twitter digests.

The linking of every damn one of my social accounts on the internet now continues apace.