So, I just had my Yahoo Pipes talk here at BarcampLondon3 at Google. It was basically a recap of this blog post, with a nice question and answer session afterwords. Cool thing though is that Tom Morris made a video of my talk and posted it to Blip.TV.

Click To Play

Beware that this tutorial is slightly unmaintained. Images are lost thanks to my hosting provider, and my own lifestream has since been changed to work with a Symfony backend. To understand Yahoo Pipes though, the text can still provide a good insight.

So, as you might have noticed I build my own little copy of a Lifestream, much like Jeremy Keith (Adactio) did on his website. Although it is fun to build a lifestream, it isn’t the simplest thing to do, so I took a different approach to use mine and build one using Yahoo Pipes.

The cool thing of using Yahoo Pipes is that my Lifestream is all Javascript+HTML and no server side logic (a.k.a. PHP). I gave a little talk during BarcampBerlin2 explaining what I did, but in the next few paragraphs I will hopefully explain with a bit more detail how it was exactly done, and also focus on some quirks of Yahoo Pipes that I had to work around.

[Next up: Combine Your Blog Posts]

Starting from today, Mailplane is localized to Dutch. Me and 5 other translators did our best to bring the tool to Dutch, Icelandic, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. All and all the app now runs in 11 languages. Pretty neat!

[Read announcement on Mailplane blog]

I couldn’t attend Alper’s thesis presentation this afternoon, for I am in London (UK) and he is in Delft (Netherlands). So in order to still be able to watch his presentation I made a simple broadcaster with Flex2 and a developers edition of Flash Media Server 2. Now some others and I were able to watch Alper’s presentation broadcasted from Eelke’s laptop, live in the webbrowser. All everyone needed was the Flash Player and optionally a webcam.

I really like the power of Flash Media Server and Flex 2. Although heavily under documented, these provide a lot of options for people who want to do nice things with video, audio, and even shared resources. I had made a simple web-lecture recorder before when I first started playing with FMS2, but that project got lost in my hard disk crash. This broadcaster I now made only took me 2 days to build.

That low development time can mainly be accredited to Flex2 which is a toolkit build on Eclipse. It allows you to separate design from code in an easy way, offering much more flexibility and support for web-application developers. Sure as hell beats Flash 8 on usability!

PS: Midway in the presentation the server died so it is not bug free yet.
PS2: It wasn’t the server, but the wireless in the room that crashed.

I’m currently working on two little projects. One is getting FourStarters - an information portal by Alper, Reinier, Martijn and me - from the ground. Alper already started blogging and I was waiting for Martijn’s cool design but that seems to take a bit more time. Additionally we (I) would like to really create some kind of community on the site to inspire and maybe invest in web startups. Today I started with some new posts that are simply derivatives of this blog

The other project I am working on is called teachr.tv and will try to tackle a major problem in education at this moment: education educators. The whole idea originated at BarCampLondon2 and tries to help teachers with electronic education (or education 2.0). The concept first came to me when we started up Education Made Easy in 2005, but in a talk to Ian Forrester the current social possibilities of the web gave me some new ideas. For now the site will integrate:

• Vodcasts that will explain basic web2.0 and social software tools to teachers
  • Del.icio.us
  • Wiki’s
• Integrated wiki to create a simple reference for educators
• Forum for discussion and posting of new ideas

For now I really want to focus on these things but any other ideas are welcome. In first place the site will be informative but I am planning to offer integrated services for teachers once the site is basically launched. Some things that could be build:

• Integrated Wiki generation and management for teachers (like wikia) because most teachers don’t have the expertise nor server available to setup a wiki for a project.
• Integrated presentation recording: this is something I have been working on for a while and I really think this is possible. Integrating audio, video, slides and maybe even questions to enable teachers to easily create online course content.

I am looking for people that might want to help creating content for teachr.tv so all help and suggestions are welcome.