Despite poor reviews of the N97, it is everything that I hoped it would be and a lot more. My benchmark is the Nokia E90, which I have used everyday for the last 2 years, the N97 is faster than the E90 in every respect that I use it for and much more fun to use.
Anyway, back to widgets. Having been excited about the functionality of widgets, I began thinking it would be great if I could collate everything I am interested in through one home screen widget 'slot'. After a bit of research on the net, I stumbled across Yahoo Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/), a graphical interface that allows you to do some pretty complex manipulation of web feeds and data and then combine them into a single Web feed.
In this example, I am using 4 feeds from news websites and performing the following actions:
- Sort in Descending Order by Date Published
- Truncate the Feeds to the Last 5 Entries
- Join all the Feeds
- Final Sort by Date Published
- Output to Pipe
In Yahoo Pipes, you then run the Pipe to generate the Feed address, which can then be configured as a Web Feed on the Nokia N97 and used in a Widget:
How to add a custom RSS widget
STEP 1: Go To Web
STEP 2: Go To Web Feeds
STEP 3: Select New Feed
STEP 4: Enter The Web Feed Address That You Created In Yahoo Pipes and Remember To Change The Automatic Updates, I use 15 minutes, Save and Exit.
STEP 5: Go Back To The Home Screen and Edit Content
STEP 6: Select Options and Add Content
STEP 7: The Web Feed That You Created In Step 4 Should Now Be In The List Of Content That Can Be Added.
STEP 8: Clicking On The Widget You Just Created Takes You To The Feed Data
STEP 9: Click On The Feed Title To Take You To The Article
STEP 10: Finished !!
Nick Anstee, All About Symbian, 12th July 2009
PS. See also RSS Mix (rssmix.com), because although it is less user friendly, it is much, much quicker to get to the end result, you just dump the feed addresses in the text box and it does the rest. Yahoo Pipes is more time consuming!