Colorless Green

With a wide network och contacts on Facebook most of whom probably do not use RSS readers, or at least haven’t bothered to subscribe to your erudiating feeds.

The Facebook application Notes will let you import an external RSS feed, but what if you write in more than one place?

The most straight-forward tool I’ve found for combining your feeds into one is Yahoo!’s Pipes.

The front page has links to screen casts on how to build your own pipe. Take a look at my schematic to see how you can combine several feeds into one:

Note that for one of these WordPress blogs I’m just importing the author feed for my own posts. If your particular blog does not allow you to do that, there are also filters you can use to get the same effect.

When you have your pipe, you can set it to be imported to Facebook here.

This is for those times you are following a list that has a fairly limited troll infestion, and you want to get rid of all messages by the troll, and all replies to him (it’s usually a him).

The “trick” is to put all of the following in the “Has the words”-field in the Gmail filter, so that you can have ORs between different types of matches. (Neater than making several rules for the same person.)

First off, a simple example, where we drop all mail from a certain adress, and also all mail to the list mentioning the trolls name or adress, to also catch any replies directed to the troll. I have found this to be adequate for my problems:

from:a@b.net OR (("Joe Random Troll" OR a@b.net) AND list:"fanac.lists.lysator.liu.se")

This assumes the list adds Mailman style List-Id headers to the messages. Otherwise just use the To field.

Here is another example, in which the troll uses a couple of different adresses to post to the list, and is also on a couple of different lists that you want to read:

from:(a@b.net OR a@h.com) OR (("Joe Random Troll" OR a@b.net OR a@h.com) AND list:("fanac.lists.lysator.liu.se" OR "sverifandom.lists.lysator.liu.se"))