Thursday, May 7

Mashups and ACS Events

R ecently I have been playing around with free online mash-up tools like  dapper, Yahoo pipes, twitter feed etc.


Using the tools was remarkability easy. I created a extraction engine in dapper by clicking on elements of the ACS Website while it was loaded into the dapper webapp and entering descriptions of the selected elements. I reused the engine by pointing it at several similar webpages. I then used  Y! Pipes to join the information together into one feed.

The ACS is revamping its website with a improved look in July 2009 with a total replacement of the website in coming in 2010.

Also ACS has come out with a twitter news feed.

RSS Feeds mentioned:


Updated: 2009


Event RSS feeds and news RSS were suppose to be added in the July 2009 website upgrade. I thought that these feeds will probably not be useful after that. However they still work fine. Since this was first published I have used this technique with the AIIA, AIPM and Churchill Club websites as well.

There have also been some new ACS twitter accounts set up.

New RSS Feeds


Updated:  2026


ACS state twitter / X accounts where deleted, only national accounts are now active

dapper was brought by Yahoo and discontinued in 2010
in 2013 Yahoo came out with their own version of dapper
in 2015 Yahoo discontinued Y! Pipes and the resurrected dapper

Modern Tools that do the same job


Old tool What it did Modern equivalents
Yahoo! Pipes Fetch → parse → filter → transform → combine → publish n8n, Make, Huginn, Zapier
Dapper Point at a webpage and extract structured fields Apify, Import.io, Browse AI, Octoparse
Pipes + Dapper together Scrape websites, mash data, transform it and republish Apify + n8n is probably the closest modern combination
RSS mashup tools Turn sites into feeds / combine feeds RSS.app, Feedly, n8n, Huginn
Screen-scraping browser extensions Select elements from a webpage Web Scraper, Browse AI, Apify


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