There are two requests that I get with overwhelming regularity for the PowerShell script repository: first, that I would add some sort of “browsing” functionality, and second, that it should have an RSS feed. Well, browsing may have to wait until a future iteration of the repository, but feeds are easy, because they’re basically just a hack-up of the “recent” items that are in the repository sidebar already, so I did it this evening.

Presenting …

PowerShellCentral.com/scripts/feed

Right now the number of items is limited to about ten, but if traffic picks up I can increase that easily — you can limit the count by passing the number of items you want to list like this: ?list=2.

You can also create a feed for specific search results (the feed will show items in relevance order, but the date is in the RSS so if you want to sort by that, you can). For instance, if you wanted to keep up to date on scripts that used SecureStrings, you would append your search terms like this: ?q=*securestring*.

As usual, my modifications to the PasteBin.com site are available on the repository site, and without much in the way of documentation. I will say this: in addition to creating the feed.php file, I moved some of the common translation functions into a translate.php file, and modified the dates that were being returned from db.mysql.class.php — it’s all under the Affero General Public License that Paul Dixon wrote PasteBin under in the first place.

After some time out of commission, I’ve cleaned up the PowerShell Bloggers feed pipe and made it work again. I also added a few blogs (there’s now 23) and fixed it so it cleans out the media links (mostly people’s avatars, it makes it readable on the Yahoo! page) and it also assigns the “author” tag so that everyone’s on similar footing.

Incidentally, the one other thing this does that makes it better than just copying the OPML, is that it filters using a regular expression to only show the posts that are actually about PowerShell … if you think I’ve missed someone, or if I need to tweak the filter or the feed’s output further … let me know.

This is just a short post to announce that I’ve created a Yahoo! “pipe” aggregating the latest PowerShell related posts (in chronological order) from a whole bunch of different PowerShell blogs. I won’t list them here, because they are listed on the pipe page, and I don’t want to have to maintain the list twice …

PowerShell Bloggers – The Yahoo! Pipe

If you know of a PowerShell blog which you think should be added to our list (even if posts on it are infrequent) please feel free to drop me a line using the comment box. In fact, if you think I’ve linked to the wrong feed for one of the ones I did include, or if you would like to have your blog removed from the list … feel free to drop me a line for that too.

By the way, for those of you who are interested in these sort of things: the rationale for creating and using a pipe rather than simply subscribing to each individual feed is pretty simple:

1. The pipe filters out posts which aren’t about PowerShell, and lists at most two weeks worth of content
2. The pipe merges posts into chronological order for use in web syndication
3. Hypothetically, the pipe gives me the ability to include sites which don’t have RSS feeds (more on that some other time)