YemKay

I’ve created a Yahoo Pipe to find the list the medals won by a country in the ongoing Olympics 2008. Visit the pipe, enter the country code and click on “Run”. Find the list of Country codes here.

The results are displayed as shown in this picture,

And how to create a feed for the medals won by your country’s Olympians from this Pipe? Here you go!!. This is the format of the feed url,

http://pipes.yahoo.com/yemkay/olympics2008medalfeed?_render=rss&country=XXX

Replace XXX with the country code. Open your feed reader, subscribe to this URL and be the first to know when Olympians from your country win medals. Feed for my country is still empty. Dont miss the hot ones - China and United States.

Read the related entry in Pipe Feeds

I’ve created a website, Pipe Feeds, to publicize my Yahoo Pipes. I will publish the Yahoo pipes created for my personal use on this website. Most of my pipes attempt to simplify the way you use the internet - from surfing to subscription. My objective of creating Pipes is that,
if you like a content from a particular section of a website, let the content come to you next time without you having to visit the website again. Widgetizing and embedding are some other benefits from Yahoo Pipes. This diagram depicts it more clearly.
Click to enlarge

To start with, I’ve published pipes for Cricket Quotes (from cricinfo), ThiruKural Widget and History of Tamil Cinema (from DinaThanthi).

The pipes Cartoons from Indian dailies, Cartoons from Tamil dailies and Adade Cartoons feed which were created in the past and later graduated to auto publishing sites are also listed.

The site is hosted on blogger. Each post will represent a pipe and has various links for embedding, gadget creation, feed subscription and Pipes source.

Read more about Yahoo Pipes and Pipe Feeds site. If you like to create any pipes for generating custom feeds, just drop a note.

As we become mobile, one of the biggest challenges is managing the applications and the files on different devices like personal computer, work PC and mobiles. In the era of Web 2.0, desktop applications like office suites, image editors and feed readers are getting re-engineered as online services by the Internet giants Google and Yahoo. I’m listing some of the online services one must use in day to day life.

as an online office suite

Create and store documents, spreadsheets and presentations online. It is possible to convert Google documents to MS office formats and back. Google spreadsheets provides an enhanced library of functions including import XML or HTML import and stock quotes. Documents can be shared with other users in view or collaboration mode. Document’s version history is maintained well and you can revert back to any older version of the document. A more generic use is embedding shared documents on web pages and blogs.

and as photo storage and sharing platforms

Upload, organize and share the photos online. Organize the photos by albums and give proper details like date, place and people names. Storage limit is a major drawback with both of these services. Flickr’s free edition provides unlimited storage space but allows you to access only the 200 last uploaded photos while Picasa provides 1 GB space

for sharing videos

Upload and share your videos. I use YouTube more as a storage space for my personal videos. Shared videos gain easy reachability thanks to the large user base of YouTube

for online feed subscription

Subscribe to your favorite feeds and read them online. Mark and share the favorite items with friends. For me, using Google Reader has become a routine like checking the inbox.

Google Notebook for organizing notes

Collect and organize plain text notes very easily. Notes could be organized as notebooks, sections and notes. There is a Firefox plugin to integrate notes with the browser

Delicious for managing bookmarks

Bookmark the favorite pages and manage the bookmarks online with delicious rather than marking pages as favorites in browsers of different machines. Bookmarks are centrally managed and periodically synced with the browsers. Add meaningful tags while bookmarking a page, so that it could be easily searched later. Don’t miss this firefox plugin which helps you to add bookmarks right from the browser and helps you to locate the page by typing in the tag name or page name

for managing clipped texts from favorite pages

While Delicious stores just the URL of the page and the tags, Clipmarks allows you to store the contents as well. Clipmarks comes handy when you want to clip and bookmark a part of a web page. Create an account and install a suitable clipmarks plugin for your browser from the download page. While browsing a page, just press the clipmarks button, select the content you want to clip and again press the clipmarks button to store the contents. You can make multiple selections in a page and clip them together. Just the text is stored and images are not. Clips exceeding 2000 characters can’t be shared and have to be stored privately.

Meebo for Instant Messaging

Login to the IMs of Yahoo, GTalk, MSN and AOL with a single meebo sign in. With meebo, you will be freed from installing multiple IM clients and multiple logins. Chat history is centrally located. To view a chat log, you don’t have to remember from which machine you logged on.

for task management

Create and manage your tasks with RTM. It integrates well with GMail and Google Calendar. So you can access the todo list right from your Gmail.

Note: If you’ve landed here from a Search Engine looking for the URL to the Satyam Reservation, here it is https://www.thecinema.in. Wait!!!, before you visit the site read this post and be prepared for the worst.

I had a hell time with the Satyam theatre’s website for online reservation. Its the best example for a badly designed website. I spent one entire day trying to book a couple of tickets for the movie Dasaavataram. The design of the Flash based website is pathetic. Some of the irritating things I’ve experienced in the website are,

• There is no link to the login screen in the home page. For checking your booking history you’ve to go through a reservation cycle to reach the login box.
• The reservation confirmation prompt takes minutes to load and waits for just 15 seconds before you click yes/no. You can’t switch to other windows till you see the confirmation prompt. If you miss the prompt, the session times out and you will have to repeat the whole process. Why is this system designed to be so secure, when banking websites have kept session timeouts to a minimum of 10 minutes. After all, the tickets aren’t blocked in this stage.
• The seat chooser screen waits for a good enough 60 secs, but you will end up spending most of the time scrolling the seat layout to see the availability. The scroll bars can’t be dragged but have to be hovered over to scroll up or down.
• Once the payment is made, the page is redirected to the source website, but it is less likely you see a status message. I got only blank pages most of the time.
• If you are lucky and go through this process successfully, a final screen allows you to take print outs of the tickets. I pressed the “Print” button and it opened a popup window. Since my IE was blocking popup windows, I had to select “Temporarily allow popups” from the top bar. Alas, it refreshed the page and the flash page lost its state and I was taken to the home page again.
• Though there is a “Order history” screen, I didn’t see my booked tickets listed there. In such cases, you need to note down the order number from the confirmation mail (if you’ve received one) and generate the ticket from a Satyam theatre window.

I could see few references about the Satyam online reservation systems by some bloggers, who have hailed this initiative as a good thing in Tamil entertainment industry. But I would say this reservation system is a shame to the IT industry. Go and check out yourself at https://www.thecinema.in(I refuse to add link), why I’m so disappointed. You will also realize why there are no credits mentioned on the site.

Never listen to anyone who says that India is an IT super power.

In continuation to the Adade Cartoons site and feed, I’ve created two similar sites for aggregating cartoons from English and Tamil magazines.

The Toons of India site pulls cartoons from Times of India, Economic Times, Indian Express, Deccan Chronicle and Hindu, while the Tamil cartoons website aggregates cartoons from the popular Tamil magazines of Dinamani, Dinamalar and Dinathanthi.

View Toons of India
View Tamil cartoons

As explained here, these custom aggregators were created using Yahoo pipes, a free tool to generate custom feeds.