Kottke on Pipes and the Web
Jason Kottke on
connecting web sites and services:
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Think of it like Unix…small pieces loosely joined. Each
specific
service handles what it’s good at. Gmail for mail, iCal for calendars,
TypePad for short bits of text, etc. Web client, desktop client, it
doesn’t much matter…whatever the user is most comfortable with. Then
you just (just! ha!) pipe all these together however you want with
services (or desktop apps) handling any filtering/processing that you
need, and output it to the file/device/service of your choice.
I’m hoping that Hep will
provide some of the simple pipes that Jason is imagining, making it
easy to move content around between all the different messaging and
publishing systems running on the Internet. It’s already proving to be
helpful. Thanks to my copy of Hep, I got Jason’s post in my Thunderbird
Inbox, and I’m typing this as a reply. As soon I hit send, Hep will
accept the message through SMTP, pull out the title and content, and
post it to my weblog through XML-RPC. Then my copy of Movable Type
will publish these words in HTML and RSS, and soon they will be read
all around the world, via browsers, bots, and aggregators.
