Listening to the interwebs

The other day I saw a tweet that pointed me towards @SavvyCitizens and their Top Ten online resources for getting savvier ahead of the general election. It really is a top list of resources and all but one of them are fully featured, for free.

Council Monitor is the one that you have to pay for to get all its features. Now, for a basic ability to look around the country and see your council's sentiment rating or look at how it compares to others this is excellent. It can give you at a glance that sort of information. However, to find out anything more you need to pay. And, for me, the costs they're suggesting make this a little bit more than just Freemium.

The basic subscription of £99 a month gives you insight into your own organisation and allows you to actually see the mentions being made about you. For an extra £100 a month you can add 5 keywords and for the princely sum of £299 a month you can have up to 10. And they're the special introductory prices.

OK so that's only about £1,200 a year and no more than £4,000 tops, so what's the big deal? After all that's nothing for organisations with budgets in the multi-millions. But it's this seemingly common attitude to the pennies leaves me thinking that it's no wonder we have a problem with the pounds. So, perhaps what will follow is not worth your effort but I end up feeling a bit disappointed that we'd rather end up paying for a service than shaping the tools that are out there ourselves*.

Council Monitor is an aggregator of content that can be found 'out there' but happens to be housed within a shiny package that allows for comparison across the national picture. I have nothing at all against the shiny but what is most important is actually hearing what is being said, listening to it and then responding. It's gratifying to know that ours is the council with the most positive mentions in the country but it's not what's important.

What's important is recognising that people are saying things and we need to hear them because our service delivery can be improved by responding to the comments being offered in cyberspace. Not in a terrifying Big Brotheresque fashion but in the way that we're coming to expect of organisations and companies that are important to us. The way that sees a need and then fills it or hears a criticism and fixes it so that not only are people valued for their contribution but the next person benefits from such a proactive response.

So, on that basis it's content which is key. It's not the overview of sentiment, which can be picked up for free but it's the actual information itself, the stuff that sets you back £99 a month for a single keyword that an organisation wants to hear. Set against Radian6 or one of the other very impressive, and fairly expensive reputation management/social media monitoring services that seems good value.

But we don't have the budget even for the good value. Dave Briggs flagged up this list of Social Media Monitoring resources which are free and sometimes have similarly shiny interfaces. But we've been thinking about how we make something that we can control and that which can pull a variety of different sources into one place. It is still in a prototype stage but the idea of doing something ourselves, whilst it might seem daunting, may actually be preferable.

But first, 2 caveats, and 3 tools

• These are not pretty solutions


• There is a lot of potential to improve them

• A variety of search engines


• Yahoo Pipes


• Netvibes

There is an impressive array of tools with which to interrogate the internet. We identified the following 15 services as being useful for different reasons but it is by no means exhaustive.

• Backtype


• Bloglines


• Blogsearch


• Boardreader


• Boardtracker


• Digg


• FixMyStreet


• Flickr


• Friendfeed


• Samepoint


• Social Mention


• Twitter


• Wikipedia


• Wordpress


• Youtube

Almost all of these use APIs to enable the interrogation of their results from afar. What this means is that we can enter a search term away from the site in question and get a response directly to us or as part of an RSS feed or into an email or a widget.

In order to do this I use Yahoo Pipes. Now, I've blogged here and here about how to do this for wildly different purposes and I like Yahoo Pipes. It is certainly quite daunting to begin with and it can be quite temperamental but on the whole it is a very clever environment in which to build tools that can search for information, connect it together and then filter it as necessary. We've used it to make pipes for the search engines listed above.

So, using that lovely technology we've put together a pipe that looks at SocialMention, and, crucially, for the point I'm hoping to make, it does return sentiment too. At the moment it is pulling two pipes - the Social Mention search and the Sentiment tracker into one.

If it doesn't work in the page then take a look at one of the following:

SocialMention (all mentions)

SocialMention (sentiment)

SocialMention (mentions and sentiment)We've got pipes for all the search engines we listed above and had wanted to make a single feed from these individual elements but find Pipes cannot cope with this although, if we had there was a recognition of what we could do and a commitment to resourcing it I think we could probably identify some other solutions too. And the beauty of it? Once you have it set up outputting for one search term you can set up more using the same infrastructure (if you want it all lumped together it will accept multiple search terms separated by commas).

We have a dump of all our pipes onto one page. Some of them do not contribute anything to us and will be rooted out; some of them duplicate content and that may mean those two feeds could be merged into one; and being a public page makes tracking and storing activity impossible. In practice this would be a private page accessible to whoever has the responsibility to keep track of the content that had been seen and/or dismissed and that which was still of interest or had not yet been looked at. The Comms & Marketing team are going to be testing it out and exploring how best to use the information and how to process it for the benefit of the organisation.

It is true that we might not be getting the same results as Council Monitor and we might not be able to gauge sentiment elsewhere (although with the right commitment to developing this we could certainly get there). It's also true that we can't get trends but that's just a metric that means nothing if we're not hearing or responding to the people who are talking about, or to, us.

We're exploring how we make this better and more useable. I'm moving placements but I'll look to blog through the technical aspects of making these things happen so that you can make your own sentiment monitoring tools. But, in the meantime, feel free to test ours and see whether they're useful as an alternative to spending money.

:)

*I feel the same about GovDelivery. What they offer is much more technical and would require more effort to duplicate but, nevertheless, it is essentially publishing content in ways that would not be difficult to fashion yourselves. At least that's my take on it.

Crowd Sourced Church

Last week was a bad week at work. The bid process for the fourth and final placement of the graduate scheme did not result in the outcome I had hoped for. And the circumstances surrounding that had left me both depressed and despondent.

On Sunday evening, church turned that on its head.

Earlier in the week there had been a slightly cryptic message sent into the Twitterverse

As Al started the service he said something along these lines and it started to make sense

We don't really have a plan, there are going to be some songs, we'll commission St Barnabas and Ursula will preach but we want to get you contributing to the service. So, tag your tweets #smlb and text your thoughts to this number or just come to the front and share

And what that resulted in was a wonderfully diverse, and rich, stream of contributions flashed up on the screens. There were texts, there were a lot of tweets and from the front there were the voices of those sharing stories without the anonymity and complexity of technology.

A church like ours is full of talented people and is incredibly well resourced in terms of preaching and leadership. That makes for a very polished experience (even when it doesn't finish at 8.30 on the dot) but there is a certain inevitability to our slipping into being consumers and sitting passively, waiting to be entertained and edified.

The leaders of this service have a difficult task in striking the right balance and on Sunday the crowd sourced approach really worked. It did mean that things were unpredictable but it gave God the opportunity to use a variety of channels and a number of different people to be his mouthpiece.

The whole God speaking thing is one of those things that makes Christians sound mental. The kind of suggestion that gets us thrown funny looks and underlines the delusional nature of our very existence. But nevertheless, bear with me (if you're still reading), Sunday was a wonderful example of knowing that it's more than just coincidence. It was one of those evenings where seemingly random activity looked, and felt, very much like the well orchestrated action of a loving saviour.

The very nature of the service - built up round a sermon on forgiveness (Ursula Simpson on top form) - addressed the stuff I had gone through last week. Dealt with it and moved on. From beginning to end the service could not have been better designed if I had sat down and thought about what I needed to hear. And it wasn't in individual songs, or words, or music, or tweets but it was in the presence of God and the answers to prayer that was evident as a product of the whole.

(Mind you, I don't actually think that faith is a prerequisite for enjoying the content of the tweets which you can find here on What The Hashtag.)

The service came together from the contributions of the people in the pews but there was no mistaking a common thread running through it, a singular inspiration working through more than just those labelled 'leader'.

We believe in a priesthood of all believers but often it's hard to get people out of the pews. Did Sunday see the first shoots of something significant? It was certainly a great experience of being, not just doing, church.

I hope this isn't just a random experiment but is something that can become a really important source of encouragement, praise and worship from day to day, not just on a Sunday. I think there's a lot of mileage in exploring how some of the emerging trends in communication can work in a church context. It will be interesting to see if that's true.

Football League Referee Appointment Checker

As you may know I am the editor of Vital Bradford and produce content for it (with appalling infrequency). One of the things I like to do is a little penpic of whoever will be in charge of the game.

The Football League launched a shiny, and fancy website at the start of the season called Refworld. It's a good place to find all sorts of information about the men in black. And it provides a feed of latest news stories.

However, if I'm honest, all I care about is the person who could be ruining my afternoon. I want to know who will be in charge of my fixtures. And I want to know as soon as possible when it's announced.

And there's no way of doing that. There's no way of seeing all upcoming fixtures for your club, or all past appointments. In a nice, easy fashion.

Yahoo Pipes is an excellent tool. I shared with you previously about how I put together something providing travel alerts from the BBC. And it's a similar principal behind the Football League Referee Appointment Checker.

Basically tell it which club you're interested in, or the referee who is notoriously dodgy and voila, you'll have the upcoming fixtures and the referee, his two assistants and the 4th official.

Subscribe to the RSS feed it generates, add an iGoogle widget, a Yahoo Pipes 'badge' or subscribe to it by email. In theory, it should update whenever the football league announce new officials.

It will be interesting whether or not it does but I hope that someone finds this useful. Even if you don't, I will.

Jury Service

On Thursday I finished my stint as a juror. It was a very interesting experience and one that I would happily repeat. I was lucky, I had as action-packed a fortnight as is possible; many others go on Jury Service to find that they sit around twiddling their thumbs, reading books or doing jigsaws.

So, what did that involve?

• 1 book
• 2 completed jigsaws
• 3 cases
• 2 court rooms
• 3 judges
• 6 barristers
• 13 live witnesses
• 34 jurors
• over 8 hours of deliberation
• 2 guilty verdicts, 1 'yes' verdict

Whilst in the middle of jury service I didn't talk about it very much. As jurors we 'judge the evidence', talking about the intricacies of a case with anyone else, no matter how briefly, could lead to us being influenced by people who haven't sat in the jury box and committed to truthfully carrying out our duties.

Now it's over, our verdicts are in and those involved in the cases are waiting on their fate I thought I'd sum up my impressions of the experience (and hopefully not find myself getting into trouble for doing so).

The first day of Jury Service was quite frustrating as we waited for court to spring into life.

We, the new jurors (9 of us - 8 men and 1 woman) were briefed and then left to our own devices. Eventually 6 names were called and they were taken away. I was one of the 3 who remained and after another pause we were taken next door to be combined with 11 of those who had started their jury service in the previous week. At about 3pm we were called for and a jury was chosen. Mine was the last name to be called and so my life as a juror began. What happened to the other 6, or the 2 who didn't make it I don't know but their Monday must have been very disappointing.

In the first case the defendant was unable to enter a plea because he suffered from an as yet undiagnosed mental illness. As a result we were not asked to come to a verdict of guilty, or not guilty but establish whether or not he was the individual responsible for committing the acts as they were alleged. The case spilled over onto Tuesday but once the Crown made its case we quickly reached a unanimous verdict to find that the defendant would be held on remand because no beds were available for him to be assessed at a secure hospital.

This was the first time that I came face to face with what was, for me, the most disquieting aspect of jury service - the aftermath. This young man needed care as well as punishment but due to a lack of space at the relevant place he was having to be held in an unsatisfactory environment. The judge made sure that he would not be left languishing in prison by placing his case under review in 2 weeks' time. That's this coming week. Hopefully a bed will have been found and a proper medical assessment can be carried out.

So, by Tuesday afternoon I was a seasoned juror and we very quickly started another case. This was a bit more involved and saw us given document bundles over 200 pages long (we were lucky, the judge's was about twice that). The Scarborough Evening News reported on this case so if you want to know the finer points you can follow this link. This was a complex case involving six different counts so when we started our deliberations on Thursday afternoon we knew it would take some time to reach our verdict and were unable to reach a unanimous verdict on all counts by the end of the day. At some point on the Thursday I was elected foreman and the following morning after we reconvened we reached unanimous verdicts and I had to stand up and tell the judge our decision.

Again the repercussions of that couldn't be part of our thinking. The defendant in this case had four children and one of the outcomes of our verdict we discovered was a custodial sentence having thought that unlikely when sat in the jury room. She will be sentenced in a fortnight.

Monday began with waiting but it was much shorter than the previous week (there wasn't enough time to complete a jigsaw). In fact we were set up and ready to go before lunch. This was the most difficult of the three cases and evidenced by the fact we spent over 5 hours deliberating from Wednesday afternoon to Thursday morning. At some point on Thursday the judge called us in to say that he would accept a majority verdict but didn't really want to hear from us unless it was unanimous, which, in the end, it was.

His sentencing won't take place for another 4 weeks during which time his life has to be dismantled. The defendant's barrister outlined the consequences of our decision to the judge who had been all set to immediately take him into custody. While you know that these are consequences of what he has done it's difficult because ultimately those other people will suffer because of the decision we made coupled to the crime he committed.

What happened in the jury room is not for public consumption but it definitely made me believe in the jury system as a tool of delivering justice. When you sit in that jury box you are one of 12 people asked to make a judgement on evidence that has the potential to alter the future of whoever is sat in the dock, and those who are dependant on them. None of my juries decided they wanted to make the evidence fit a particular version of events. None of my juries pre-judged the verdicts after one or two sessions. All of my juries carefully considered the issues, pieced together the evidence, understood the law as the judge directed and came to verdicts that were, for us, beyond doubt.

It's hard because in two of the cases that absence of doubt has consequences far beyond just the individual represented there whether it's for family members, employees or customers. The human cost of a crime isn't just counted by the direct victim(s).

It's hard because that can mean we have more compassion for those affected by the activity of court than for those affected by the original crime (although I imagine that depends largely on the nature of the case).

It's hard because we weren't present when decisions were made, actions taken and words written. We know that someone who has taken to the stand has got the wrong end of the stick either maliciously or accidentally - not everyone has told us the true version of events.

It's hard because there are legal professionals who sit in robes and wigs making the case for the prosecution, defending the accused and judging the law. They go through masses of preparation and sit in court all year round. They will see similar cases and will expect a particular verdict. After all, not only are they as capable of judging the evidence as us, they actually know the ins and outs of law and crime.

Being a juror is not easy. It shouldn't be. Being a juror ought to be difficult, it ought to keep you thinking about justice, criminality and perception because then you're not just treating it flippantly. It has been suggested that we should have professional juries but the idea of being tried by 'a jury of your peers' means that real men and women sit round a table and hammer out a decision.

Across the two weeks people brought papers into the jury rooms. We had Guardians, and Suns; Mails and Mirrors and we discussed the nature of justice. There was a lot of reflection in those rooms about the ease with which we jump to conclusions, the way in which the media portray the decisions reached by jurors and the wider perception of how judges respond (generally with too much leniency). Whilst people might not reconsider their response to crime, or the way they treat former offenders the act of serving on a jury clearly affords the opportunity to ponder what justice and truth look like for ourselves because we can't refer to anyone else.

Those waiting to be sentenced probably don't think that they're very lucky at the moment. Having been on the inside of the jury room I think they were. I think all involved with those three cases were because the 34 people charged with considering the evidence did so even-handedly, carefully and fairly.

I would have loved to be writing this saying that I sat on three cases and found three people innocent, to have cleared the names of the accused. Sadly, unanimously, the evidence in front of us did not let us do that. If our minds were even 1% doubtful then we could not have returned the verdicts we did. Perhaps that surprised our judges, our lawyers and those who stood accused. I hope it didn't.

Swears

I'm doing jury service at the moment. And the courts are full of spiritual connotations. If it's not bowing in reverence, or calling judges 'Lord' or 'Worship' it's the very presence of an advocate interceding on behalf of someone else. Mind you, it's hardly a surprise that an environment built to house truth and justice should remind me of God.

However, what's most striking is the spiritual barometer of trustworthiness, the swearing of an oath on the Bible.

'I swear by Almighty God that I will faithfully try the defendant(s) and give a true verdict (true verdicts) according to the evidence.’

All those on my jury chose to do this. I didn't.

And you may think that's quite strange given that I am a Christian, that I believe in a personal relationship with God and that the Bible is a phenomenal tool for equipping us to live to our potential (actually irrespective of whether you have faith or not).

I don't know whether the 11 people who swore on the Bible would describe themselves as Christians. If they wouldn't then it seems a little strange to start court proceedings with what amounts to a falsehood (not that this is an accusation of perjury!).

It might make the Daily Mail weep but I just don't understand the reason for having a spiritual barometer of trustworthiness. And the reason for that is because Jesus tells his followers that oath taking, that swearing by heaven or by God isn't necessary.

The Sermon on the Mount is one of the most well-known chunks of Jesus' ministry (and another one of those moments in the Life of Brian where the two figures are demarcated). In amongst the Beatitudes and a warning about our thoughts rather than just our acts Jesus talks about oaths.

Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. (Matthew 5:33-36)

And why shouldn't, as followers of Jesus, we take oaths? Because Christians should 'let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one'.

Part of being a Christian is being trustworthy, of having integrity, of being credible and living a life that reflects the person of Jesus (or tries to). This is what Jesus is saying. He's saying if you follow my teachings then you don't need to swear oaths to make a promise. If you promise to do something, why would you do anything other than keep it?

When I said I was affirming there was slight confusion about what that meant. Someone said it was "for those who aren't religious". Obviously, for me, it was actually for completely the opposite reason.

If the court system was to lose the spiritual barometer for trustworthiness there would be OUTRAGE and it would be further evidence of a creeping secularism. Would it? Wouldn't it actually be Christians recognising that it's in conflict with what we believe and for those that don't have a relationship with God, or even any faith in Him, creates a situation that may actually ring hollow?

4 Cs for #cnvrstns in 2010

This week has seen the 2010 restart to our church, Conversations, and another new venue. Vodka Revolution might be a surprising venue for god-bothering, it might not be an obvious place for people to worship God and enjoy fellowship with one another but on the basis of this week it's going to be a great location. There was an air of excited expectancy amongst those of us who were there on Wednesday evening and a real buzz around the venue and its public that had been lacking in some of the other places we've been.

One of the things that's integral to the way we 'do church' as Conversations is not to leave our relationships at face value in services but to be active in supporting, praying, encouraging and seeing each other during the week. One of the ways we do that is through cell groups. That's not cell in its negative connotations but in the organic sense - following the imagery of the Body of the Christ and recognising that we hope to grow and eventually multiply from one to more.

Thursday nights are cell night and it was great to have fellowship with each other over food wonderfully prepared by Mrs Wellers. As we digested we chatted about what the coming year might look like. The upshot of this, in a delayed New Year Resolution styleee, was commitments around 4 Cs (only because Christians need alliterative groups of cheesy words, not because we're sticklers for grammatical accuracy):

• Our Celves (I did warn you)
• Our Cell
• Our Church
• Our City

One of the amazing things about cell is the space it allows us for accountability, relationships and confidentiality so I'm not going to blog about those except to say that together we're going to support each other in continuing the commitments we wanted to make for ourCelves and revisit them as the year progresses.

We've committed to making our cell work, to ensuring that we meet for cell but beyond that we are a community, not just people that meet up once a week.

We're committed to our church, to supporting the work it does in prayer and by turning up but also in making sure that the welcome we've had is true of the experience for anyone else who visits on a Wednesday night.

And in doing this we're committed to York, to our city, to loving it and supporting it and encouraging it. By more prayer, through the work of Besom and Street Angels and in being a credible and relevant example of Jesus to those around us.

If you're around us hold us up to those standards, help us to get the balance right between being part of Conversations, part of our cell and part of our city and challenge us if we're falling short of these standards.

I have a funny feeling that 2010 is going to be a good year. Exciting.

How to get BBC Travel updates via RSS using Yahoo Pipes

Here's a bit of a departure from my normal blogging content, sporadic though it is.

I've just been at university and while I was there I got an email from a colleague asking about good examples of transport content for local government websites. I didn't throw the query out to Twitter particularly well as the responses I got were about examples of dynamic travel news such as the Highways Agency Clearspring/GovDelivery widget or Godalming's repurposing of the same content to give geographical proximity.

Yesterday I was looking at how I might get back to York because of the weather. During the afternoon's lecture, cursing my stupidity at not leaving at lunchtime, I visited the BBC and discovered, to my surprise that their traffic details offer nothing in the way of subscription.

With plenty of time on trains, platforms and coaches to tinker I thought I'd see if I could manage to do something about that. The terms of the BBC's travel feed are that they are for personal and non-commercial usage so if you want to be able to get the latest information for yourselves then here's how to do it very simply.

Visit this Yahoo Pipe, enter the relevant locality or service and click Run. The wonderful thing about Yahoo Pipes is that it will then give you an RSS feed, or with a quick click of a button a badge you can put onto your own blog.

But maybe you want to get to grips with what's going on behind the scenes, so here's a quick introduction to the world of Yahoo Pipes.

Now, I love technology and have some basic knowledge about php, html and css that's faded over time but I've found Pipes to be a brilliant tool for doing a whole host of things. This might not be perfect but it does work! Obviously the BBC don't want this stuff being used commercially because they pay for it but if you'd like to build this pipe yourself here's how I did it.

Step 1

The first thing to do is extract the data from the BBC. The irony is that the BBC actually use RSS to populate the page but don't expose it for syndication. The format of the feed is http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/local/york.shtml. 'york' is the only part that changes for each different feed.

Step 2

So we need to build that URL. To do that I created a new pipe and selected User inputs > Text input. The 'name' field designates what these things will be called; the 'prompt' is the text displayed alongside the empty entry boxes when you run the pipe; the position organises where the input is displayed; the 'default' is what the field contains automatically; and 'debug' is the content used by the pipe in its design state when you're testing it.

Step 3

This provides the area information, in my case york. The BBC feed needs to have .shtml added to the end so we use String > String Builder (and the Highways requires .xml and follows the same principles). We need to connect the String Builder to the Text input box and this is where the name 'pipes' comes from. By clicking on the circular connector and dragging it to another it will connect, or wire, them together. Having done that click the '+' to add another part to the string, the .shtml or .xml.

Step 4

Now we can finish the URL itself. To do that we need URL > URL Builder.

The 'base' is the URL we're tacking the string we've created onto. For us this is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/local and

http://www.highways.gov.uk/rssfeed

The 'path elements' is what we've just made, so wire them together. In this instance there are no 'Query parameters' so just ignore that part.

Step 5

Having got the source data URL we need to fetch it. The Highways Agency is already in the right format so we need only use Sources > Fetch Feed and wire it into the URL. For the time being nothing more needs to be done to the Highways Agency feed so we'll come back to it.

The BBC content is more complicated. We need to fetch the page Sources > Fetch Page and then cut the information from within the page. First of all we wire the URL and the URL Builder together. Having looked at the source of the page the information we're interested in is between these two pieces of html: and . So we cut content from one, to the other.

Because the page is structured using a table each individual piece of information is within a table row, or and so (the end of each table row) is our 'delimiter' (the term that separates one piece of content from another.

Step 6

This is where things become considerably more complicated but I'll try to explain it as simply as possible. Add an Operators > Regex module (short for Regular Expression), this takes a piece of code and, according to what you tell it, will repurpose it. The data from the BBC is written to be displayed as a website, not as a feed so contains html and other formatting information. We want to get rid of it.

So, 'item.content' needs tidying up. This piece of regex module removes formatting instructions such as bold, italic and font size. In all cases we want to remove any mention of them so tick the 'g' for 'global matching'.

The other thing we want to remove is the initial code that labels each table row with a unique reference that ends : name="3469238">. The regex '\">' removes everything until it comes across the exact combination of "> and so takes that initial code away.

In the image you'll see checkboxes marked g, s, m and i. Most of the g boxes are ticked this allows global matching, so all instances of a string are covered.

Step 7

Now the content needs to be made into a series of separate parts. We do that using the Operators > Rename. Doing this splits the content into 'title', 'description' and 'time' so that we can duplicate the information and build the final items for our feed.

Step 8

Having created those some more regex is required to restrict the content of each part. You have to analyse the source to see where the breaks, or the changes need to be made. I was using the most basic regex '.+', the full stop represents any character and the plus sign refers to any number of the preceding character.

I decided to extract the severity image, Road Name and Location as the title. The way the source code was written meant this required removing everything after the first line break (<BR>). The regex to do this is <BR>.+.

The item.description was next up. The relevant data was separated in the code by a line break preceded by a space ( <BR>), the regex was consequently ".+ <BR>". The second thing I did here was remove an errant comma.

I also wanted to pull out the time of the update so that the feed can be sorted at the end. This data could be separated from the remainder of the content by a double line break (<BR><BR>). The regex for this was .+<BR><BR>.

On this occasion, the s check boxes are marked. These allow the '.' to match across newlines which is needed with this data because the html source code of the BBC page is split across a lot of them.

Step 9

As far as I understand RSS, which isn't particularly technically, they need a pubDate in order to publish properly and to sort. At the moment the feed doesn't have one. However, what was just done to item.time has put it into an acceptable format so by renaming item.time to item.pubDate this will work and allow a way of sorting the feed to make sure the most recent content is seen first.

Step 10

The module Operators > Union will bring multiple feeds together which means wiring up the original Highways Agency feed and the Rename module.

Step 11

Operators > Sort takes both those feeds and sorts them. In this instance by item.pubDate and in descending order (most recent first)

Step 12

And that's it, you can wire it all together and publish the pipe. Click save and then run it.

Hope that's useful to someone! While it works there may be better ways of doing it so if you can help me learn how to do that I'd be very interested.