ara pehlivanian

Sometime last week I decided that I wanted to get a better grasp on Yahoo! Pipes. I noticed that the easiest thing to do with it was to mash up different feeds into one. So that’s what I did, I put all of my feeds into one master feed. Then I figured, “hey, why not label all the feed entries so that you can tell which entry comes from where at a glance”. That allowed me to play with Pipes’ regex operator which was good practice. When I was done, I pumped the feed through feedburner so I could track it’s use and I sent it out to a bunch of friends. I figured that if anyone wanted to–for whatever reason–keep up with what I was doing, they’d just need to look at that feed. I named it “Track Ara on the Web“.

What’s very weird is that today Jonathan Snook mentioned on twitter how he’d enjoyed Jeremy Keith’s post on his life stream, which made me do a double take. It sounded to me like he was talking about what I’d just done. Sure enough, it’s exactly the same concept, except that he’d done it 4 months ago, and Jeremy’s “stream” is rendered in a page so it’s pretty to look at. In fact, it seems like a lot of people have been doing this (Jeff Croft’s stream, Emily Chang’s Data Stream) and I hadn’t the faintest clue. Cool.

Either way, these coincidences are starting to freak me out.