Blogs.sun.com is the central hub of all the sun blogs of all sun employees out there. It is an aggregator of all sun blogs, so to speak, and it's pretty cool.. It shows us 10 most recent posts in the left hand side column, we see a column dedicated to showing the 10 newest blogs at the right hand side, and at the top we see a good looking cloud of tags used in posts made by sun bloggers.. and ofcourse there are RSS feeds for syndication with your feed readers, etc. Well, that's not it. There's one thing on this page, which might tend to bring us sun bloggers, back to the page again and again, and that is the popular blogs column in the middle. This little column shows what's most important for us bloggers, and that is a list of the top 100 60 sun blogs along with their hits.. Everybody wants to get up there some day. And recently I've found myself visiting this page again and again just to find out if my blog has reached the top 100 60 or not.. :D Just kidding. It has got a long long way to get up there. Being pretty much of a web 2.0 freak, today morning I got an idea, that why not create an automated way to get notified about this instead of having to keep opening this page manually.. I could easily use dapper to scrape off the list, create pretty RSS feeds, gadgets and conditional email alerts out of it.. and furthermore i could use yahoo pipes to do other cool stuff with it.. thats exactly what i've done.. and i'm going to show you how i've done it in this screencast:

This was my first narrated screencast. The one I had done earlier didn't have a voice-over.

What I've basically done is taken the blogs.sun.com homepage as input and created an email alert service which periodically checks if my the popular blogs section contains my blog's name, and alerts me by email if it does. I am also able to get that list on my blog as an HTML widget / flash widget, or as a google, facebook, or pageflakes gadget or as an RSS feed.. ! :) .. all done without a single line of coding ofcourse -- all done thanks to a Dapper.net and Yahoo Pipes mashup!

Get the stuff here:

• Popular Blogs at blogs.sun.com dapp (get the Email Alert, XML, RSS, HTML, Flash Gadget, Google Gadget, etc. from here)
  


• Popular Blogs at blogs.sun.com yahoo pipe (get badge, yahoo alert, yahoo/google gadget, RSS, JSON, XML feed, etc from here)
  

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