Tag | RSSBus Posts
A couple of days ago I decided to reinstall the latest Microsoft Developer Training Kits. One of those kits was the Windows Azure Training Kit. It turned out to be a web matrix install that seemed to take forever. More importantly it installed SQL Server 2012 for me. It may have prompted me but I don’t remember but once installed I entered a couple of days of nightmare mode. My RSSBus ADO connection to QuickBooks had stopped working and worst of all LightSwitch was totally broken. The problem is ...
I’ve written about Visual Studio LightSwitch several times in this blog and in my Redmond Review column, including this month’s piece, “LightSwitch: The Answer to the Right Question.” All throughout, I’ve been pretty clear in my support of the product. A little over two weeks ago LightSwitch shipped, and I think it’s off to a very good start. To help it along, I wrote a series of five whitepapers on LightSwitch for the product team, and they were just published by Microsoft. You can find them all ...
This post is the tenth and last in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #10 - Keep Your SharePoint Calendar Synced with Google The following is one way you can use to keep your SharePoint Calendar(s) synced up with your Google Calendar. This particular example only syncs in one direction: from Google to SharePoint. It could go the opposite direction, ...
This post is the ninth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #9 – Microsoft Dynamics CRM The credit for this particular web part template goes to one of my co-workers Shannon Prue. I asked him if he could put together a MS CRM template example for me, and a few minutes later I had in my inbox a 10 line example template! In the past, integrating ...
This post is the eighth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #8 – Twitter Many times since I originally posted about it months ago, I’ve been asked for more details about including Twitter searches and streams inside their SharePoint pages. Thanks to the Twitter API and feeds, this is very simple to do, and to change from showing searches, ...
This post is the seventh in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #7 – Search Email History One of my good friends here recently asked me to give him an easy way to quickly bring up a list of email correspondence to and from a particular email address over the past 6 months. This way, if he is assisting someone on the telephone or email, he can ...
This post is the sixth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #6 – Shipment Tracking Web Part! I’ve been holding on to this one for a while. Until recently it was just a FedEx shipment tracker, but now the UPS and USPS Connectors have been published at RSSBus.com so this can be what I wanted it to be. This sample will allow the user to input ...
This post is the fifth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #5 – QuickBooks Web Part! I accidently overwrote the original post. Sorry about that. Below are the steps for the QuickBooks webpart. If there are other QB searches you need to do, I can help with that. The RSSBus QBOps Connector has a ton of functionality. Step one is to make sure ...
This post is the fourth in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #4 – List Active Directory Groups and Users This web part will list each user group and its members, as defined in your Active Directory (or other LDAP server) installation. Step one is to make sure you have the RSSBus Web Part installed. See here for instructions. Step two, make ...
Here is a screencast showing the absolute basics of how to use the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part. The screencast does not go over installation, but all that requires is that you download and run the setup on your SharePoint machine. Technorati Tags: SharePoint, RSSBus ...
This post is the third in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #3 – Custom SQL Queries This web part will perform a custom SQL query, and allow you to display them however you like. Unlike previous examples, this one won’t be just cut and paste, since you’ll have to provide your own SQL connection string and query, and make replacements inside ...
This post is the second in a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. #2 – List Document Libraries and Documents For this example, we’ll make a web part that displays a list of the most recently modified document libraries/documents on the site. Lots of SharePoint sites contain many libraries, each containing dozens or even hundreds of documents. Often ...
RSSBus (@rssbus) is promoting a "limited time offer - one per company" free 10-user site license for the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part. I don't know how long it will be available, but here is the link. The timing of this offer is quite nice for me since I have started the blog post series "10 DIY SharePoint Web Parts". Tags: SharePoint, RSSBus, WebPart ...
This post marks the beginning of a series of postings, containing examples of SharePoint WebParts that anybody can build all by themselves. After that intro you’re probably already wondering what the catch is, and yep, there is one. These examples will require the use of the highly acclaimed RSSBus SharePoint WebPart. To read all posts in this series, or to get started with the RSSBus WebPart, go here. And now…let’s get on with it! #1 – SharePoint Image Rotator Step one is to make sure you have the ...
The default RSS feeds in SharePoint are very basic and I want them to contain more information. I managed this by generating my own RSS feeds. Here is how I did it: First, install the RSSBus SharePoint WebPart. After running the setup, go to the Site Collection Features page to activate the Web Part. In order to create custom RSS feeds, you’ll also need to activate the “RSSBus Service Handler” feature. I created a special document library for my feeds, I called it “Really Simple Services”, since ...
I added a little newsgroup browser to my SharePoint site with about a one page RSSBus SharePoint WebPart template. It works by importing the RSSBus NntpOps Connector. It calls its nntpListArticles operation to list the articles of a particular newsgroup and displays them in a table. Then when an article is clicked on, it calls the nntpGetArticle operation to retrieve the actual article – don’t worry – it will only retrieve the first 1000 lines of the article – if the thread is larger than that it ...
I used the RSSBus WebPart to create a multi-source search in SharePoint – this will let me enter one search term, and see results from a variety of different search services at the same time. The RSSBus WebPart template turned out to be extremely simple, thanks to its built-in feed manipulation capabilities. <div id="search"> <label for="search"><b>Se... <input id="search" type="text" name="search" size="25" value="[[_request.form:search| def('')]]" ...
In part 1, I showed how to add Twitter Search to SharePoint using the RSSBus WebPart. In part 2, I added input properties to the script so that the web part was controlled by the properties in the property editor. Now, I can hook this up with a regular input textbox to let the user drive the search. Now my RSSBus WebPart script looks like this: <rsb:info title="My Custom Search"> <input name="query" description="A default query" default="SharePoint" /> </rsb:info> <div align="center" ...
In an earlier post I showed how I use the RSSBus SharePoint WebPart to show a list of Twitter search results in your SharePoint pages. Now I’ll expand on that a bit to show how to make the WebPart a bit more dynamic. The script of the webpart itself gives a ton of power to the webpart user. As shown before, each tweet can be formatted however you like. But we can do so much more, like specifying webpart input properties. Starting with the same script from last time, here’s how I can make the search ...
I saw Michael @Gannotti’s Tweets Wiki and thought it was pretty handy. It made me think of @jazzychad’s TweetGrid and how that would be nice inside SharePoint. So I combined these two into my own little twitter search page in SharePoint, and here’s how: Tools I used: RSSBus SharePoint WebPart. Installed and activated the RSSBus SharePoint WebPart, added the webpart to my SharePoint page. I went to search.twitter.com, and did a search for “PowerShell”. The results page includes the RSS feed for the ...
PowerShell users are scripters and developers who love productivity tools. That’s why you and I like PowerShell – it gives us so much to help us work more efficiently. RSSBus is another swiss-army knife of technology along this same vein, and is a handy complement to PowerShell. The biggest wins? #1, RSSBus makes it easy to get data. No matter the source of the data (tons of sources are supported already, with many more to come and an open interface so anybody can build more data connectors), with ...
I’ll be a guest on the extremely informative PowerScripting Podcast this Thursday evening (4/2/09). I’ll talk about some of the PowerShell-related products I am working on at /n software like NetCmdlets, RSSBus, PowerShell Server, as well as join in on some general PowerShell geek fun. Also I’ll give a sneak peak of some new freebie PowerShell toys coming out for PowerShell enthusiasts. Join in on the live UStream at 9pm EST Thursday and say “hi” – or download the podcast later from the PowerScripting ...
1. I installed and activated the RSSBus Web Part for SharePoint, which allows me as a SharePoint owner or member to create a customized web part from one of dozens of RSSBus connectors or any RSS/Atom feed I like, such as a Twitter Search RSS feed. 2. I added the RSSBus Web Part to my SharePoint page, and edited its content using the Source Editor. I am using the following template to format the results of my search.twitter.com RSS result: <rsb:call op=http://search.twitter.co... ...
The RSSBus SharePoint Web Part might just be the most exciting thing I’ve had the pleasure to work with in quite a while. RSSBus is an amazingly powerful product, but the RSSBus SharePoint Web Part…its just a thing of beauty. What the web part does: it lets you expose data from just about anywhere inside SharePoint. The simplest example is to show an RSS feed like Google News or Yahoo News. I tweeted about that last week. I put together two more simple examples. One is using my Twitter Search RSS ...
Ralph James put together a video entitled “The Case For Simple Services”: Discover RSSBus Simple Services™. This video explores simple services concepts, and demonstrates how RSSBus can be used to enhance data, application, and service accessibility. RSSBus Simple Services are "simple" because they are called with standard URLs and they return data streams as RSS name-value pairs, HTML pages, and other popular, easy-to-consume formats. They don't require programming, custom clients, SOAP envelopes, ...
I published SimpleTracker, is a simple service that will accept a tracking number or package id from major shipping companies (FedEx, USPS, and UPS), and spit out an RSS feed which you can then subscribe to in your favorite feed reader (FeedDemon, Google Reader, Outlook, Bloglines, etc). Oftentimes I’m obsessed with knowing where my packages are and why they aren’t on my doorstep yet. Now I’ll always know, without having to keep visiting the tracking website over and over! :) Technorati Tags: FedEx, ...
Microsoft MVP Richard Seroter started a series of posts on building enterprise mashups using RSSBus. Part 1, and Part 2. A few weeks ago our Executive Director / Chief Architect / Technology Overlord recently asked me to build a real, live enterprise mashup application to demonstrate for our IT leadership group. Our goal was to show that RSSBus could be used to quickly and efficiently aggregate data in compelling new ways. In the next few posts, I’m going to walk through our use case, and how I built ...
Here is an RSS to iCal converter that I published last week. All it does it take your RSS url, and give you back another one that calls RSSBus, and asks RSSBus to retrieve your URL and convert it to iCAL for you! Recently I came across several RSS feeds of schedules. One was a product release schedule, another a football schedule (go pack!). I was slightly annoyed that RSS was chosen for schedules since no feed readers really know how to handle a future pubDate, but I quickly realized it would be ...
If you’re an RSSBus user who is using my Google Calendar –> Twitter or Flickr –> Twitter services, you might notice a minor change to both. I changed Twitterminder so that tweets resulting from Google Calendar entries are prepended with “GCal: “. I did the same thing with the Flickr->Twitter script, it will now prepend “Flickr: “. Related: How to call these services from your own applications. Related: How I converted TwitterMinder into Flickr->Twitter by changing 4 lines of code ...
If you’re reading this (and you’re not just one of my friends or acquaintances who is stalking me), you know you’ve done it. Yep, you know you have. You’ve spoken to someone or written to someone in various computer languages. It just happened here at /n software in an IM conversation between two of my co-workers, James and Tom. James is trying to get a group of people together to see the Pink Floyd Experience. James IM’d Tom in RSBScript (For you nerds that don’t know, RSBScript is an xml-based ...
Right after Google Spreadsheets came out, I got a ton of downloads from a little class library I wrote for interacting with it over HTTP. Problem is, Google didn't provide a true API - the solution was to use HTTP to manually perform the gets and posts required to manage each spreadsheet. Now its much easier thanks to RSSBus! Here is a sample Google spreadsheet, it looks like this: A B C D 1 Name Hours Items IPM 2 Bingley 10 2 0.0033 3 Captain Carter 200 75360 6.28 4 Dawson 200 100000 8.3333 5 Colonel ...
I just uploaded a new YouTube video for RSSBus. Some of it is hard to see, but soon it will be published at rssbus.com as a high quality flash video. RSSBus can be used to securely serve custom feeds over the Internet or on the local host. This video shows examples of very basic feeds that can be created with RSSBus with just a few mouse clicks, and more complex piped feeds. Near the end, the video shows some ways in which RSSBus can be integrated into real world solutions. Obviously, RSSBus can ...
Richard Seroter has posted an update on his BizTalk RSS feed generation using RSSBus. He's using RSSBus to generate perf metrics feeds for his BizTalk applications. In this post, Richard talks about how he uses the RSSBus caching features to avoid the extra load on his BizTalk databases, and shows how he's integrated the resulting feed into a web part. BiztalkOps - more infoSqlOps - more info Technorati Tags: BizTalk, RSSBus, RSS ...
Jon Udell is asking for a service to deliver a feed containing the union of tagged items from various services. I've been doing this for a while (though not for astronomy) using RSSBus. Here's my script: <rsb:set attr="feed#1" value="http://del.icio.us/r... /><rsb:set attr="feed#2" value="http://feeds.technor... /><rsb:set attr="feed#3" value="http://api.flickr.co... /><rsb:set ...
Sam Ruby pointed out some of the changes that would be required for Feed Validator to support the new RSS Profile. The RSS Profile is the result of checking popular feed reader capabilities in order to put together a "best practices" document for feed publishers. I haven't gotten to read through the entire profile yet, but here are some interesting things I noticed while reading through Sam's validator changes: Encoding - the profile says to use hexadecimal entity encoding (ie, & instead ...
A couple months ago Richard Seroter posted about how he created RSS feeds for BizTalk metrics - traffic by application and suspended messages by application. Now with the latest release of RSSBus (RC1) - a new connector, BizTalkOps, is available. BizTalkOps includes operations that generate the following feeds: biztalkAllServiceInstances Return the list of all service instances, independent on their state. biztalkApplications List all BizTalk applications and their status biztalkApplicationStatus ...
Continuing on with RSSBus scripts showing how to pipe Google Calendar to Twitter and Flickr to Twitter, here's my last Twitter RSBScript. Here's a script to pipe any existing RSS feed to Twitter. I wanted to sync my blog with my twitter, so now everytime I post a new blog entry, it will be added to my Twitter status. Here's the url: http://www.textbox1.com/app... blog_url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds... &twitter_password=mypas... &twitter_user=mytwitter... ...
To illustrate what I mentioned in the previous post about how swapping out one connector for another to achieve a completely different task would be very simple - I did just that. I noticed that Dave Winer has been working on some sort of Flickr->Twitter app. I changed about 4 lines of code in the Gcal_to_Twitter RSBScript to make it into Flickr_to_Twitter. In the updated script, all I did was change the call to gcalSearch to a call to the atom feed of my Flickr photos. Then I do a quick check ...
UPDATE: For full TwitterMinder documentation, see this TwitterMinder article. In my last two posts I mentioned my recent introduction to Twitter (after having watched so many people blab about it for the past few months). So today I went ahead and published my Google Calendar to Twitter RSBScript, and gave it the name TwitterMinder: TwitterMinder will check your Google Calendar for events that are occuring in the next hour, and if it finds any, they will be automatically submitted to your Twitter ...
A few months ago, Charlie pointed out how it might be useful to have a script that would automatically post Google Calendar events on Twitter. Then he found someone that had already done it. Well, at the time I filed a note to do this with RSSBus - but then I got busy and never got to it - until today! :) Let me say that I did the RSSBus script first, and then I looked at how the other guy did it (he used a 200 line php script + Yahoo Pipes). Here's my roughly 20 line RSB script (using the RSSBus ...
If you are using Twitter, let me know so I can follow you. Yep, I'm on Twitter now, finally. I decided to give it a shot and see what all the hoopla is about. Is it really that great? We'll see. While I'm checking it out - I decided to look at its API and look into whether or not I should throw together a Twitter connector for RSSBus. The API is very compact - simple and to the point. All simple HTTP get and put. All of the API methods return data in several formats - it looks like all of the gets ...
With RSSBus, right out of the box you can run a SQL query on an Excel sheet using the excelQuery operation. If you create a little RSSBus script, you can also perform queries on SQL Server, Access, or other database sources and pipe the results into Excel: <!--hard-code some inputs to sqlQuery: --><rsb:set item="myinput" attr="query" value="SELECT TOP 20 * FROM Customers" /><rsb:set item="myinput" attr="conn" value="Data Source=localhost\\SQLEXPRES... Catalog=Northwind;" /> ...
Randy Charles Morin doesn't know why anyone would want to use RSS to transmit OFX data. I find his confusion odd: ... why do you need RSS as an envelop for financial data in the first place. We have OFX, which predates RSS and works just fine. RSS can't be expected to do everything. Not that it can't. You can also use RSS as an envelope for OFX, but why not just use OFX? I don't expect my dishwasher to do the laundry, even if it can. RSS can be expected to do what it is best at - syndicating data ...
I was reading an old post on Scott Hanselman's blog about accessing private feeds via RSS. The discussion turned toward comparing RSS reader requests to OFX requests that applications like Microsoft Money make to banks. A comment from "Jordan": No CTO wants to have his face on the cover of the Wall Street Journal because his site provided an RSS feed to Bloglines and Bloglines has a security breach that exposes all that information. I have several private RSS feeds that I would not trust a third ...
If you can't get an account for Google Mashup Editor, take the tour. Neat, huh? Then download RSSBus! If you do have GME, use RSSBus to generate feeds that you can use inside GME. Have some data that you'd like to quickly expose in an RSS or atom feed? RSSBus. Tags: google mashup editor, mashup, mashup blog, rssbus, rss ...
Raymond Yee wants to know how well RSSBus works as a mashup tool. While its true that RSSBus offers a lot of connectors that make it easy to mashup data coming from sources like Flickr, Amazon, and pre-existing RSS feeds - its also important to know that RSSBus is not only valuable as a mashup creation tool. One of its biggest uses is on the flip side of the coin - helping sources expose data in the first place. Without companies like Flickr and Amazon exposing their data in structured formats like ...
Mashed up data - comments on some available tools for working with data. Working with data - How the Encylcopedia of Life and other data-rich organizations can benefit from a data tool like RSSBus. Enterprise RSS - Read/Write web highlights three players in the Enterprise RSS space. Note: Newsgator has partnered with RSSBus in order to help its customers "RSSify" corporate data ...
Here's an example of creating a feed of your Flickr contacts' favorite photos using RSSBus, which makes complex feed parsing/manipulation tasks easy. In my next post after this one I'll talk about how you can use RSSBus caching so that you can control which items are returned in the actual feed (for those with large numbers of contacts or favorited photos). For example, if this feed results in 400 photos for you, successive requests for the feed will not continue to return 400 photos - but only the ...
Ian McAllister announced new support for RSS feeds for tags at Amazon.com. These feeds will be fun to play with in RSSBus. It would be interesting to take the AmzWishlist widget that I created with RSSBus and create an RSS feed that will show me items on Amazon.com that are tagged with the same terms as items I already have in my wishlist. Hmm.... I noticed that a commenter to Ian's post mentioned that he couldn't wait for RSS feeds for generic Amazon searches. Of course such feeds already exist ...
Here is an example of a dynamic Excel spreadsheet that populates itself with data from an RSS feed of stock quote details. Each time you open the document, it will automatically reload the data from the feed. Also the feed, while open, will even auto-refresh periodically (whether or not this happens and the interval at which it happens are all configurable inside Excel). The stock quote feed itself is generated using the RSSBus yahooStockQuotes operation (pictured below) which consumes a Yahoo service. ...