I have no idea why people would upvote this story.
It is a book containing a bunch of links sorted by categories. Anyone can submit, it has to be approved by some people and then you are on it and maybe other search engines will use it. Although, I doubt anyone is using DMOZ nowadays. It is pretty old... I'm surprised it is still up.
If I had something interesting to say about that, I ran into their list of cryptographers:
Pretty much how you navigated the web before search engines. Also, something all SEO'ers tried to get their sites into as search engines used to use this as seed site for their crawling process. But, yeah, I don't know why anybody would post it. Maybe they were feeling nostalgic.
I submitted this because, although it might be hard to believe, I'm young enough that I hadn't heard of it, and only found it during a random link deep dive. It felt like some eldritch internet horror that the people on HN might know about and be able to explain!
This is one of the first open content projects. A precursor of Wikipedia in a way. I'm surprised it still exists. It was fairly popular, but mostly because there weren't any really better directories, and Google wasn't all-encompassing yet.
It's Wikipediaesque in that it's a collaboratively produced redference. No it doesn't have the content element of Wikipedia, but the idea that random netizens could take on Yahoo was novel.
It's still a bad argument. Just because it's collaborative, it doesn't make it Wikipediaesque since it's obviously just a directory and not a wiki. It's like calling a bicycle, automotive; just because it has wheels and can move. Moreover (I don't know if this has changed but) back then, you'd have to apply and be approved to actually edit content on dmoz vs just being able to register and being able to edit content on wikipedia.
I edited my comment from "A precursor of Wikipedia" to "A precursor of Wikipedia in a way" pretty quickly after I posted it, but maybe you reacted to the first version? I wanted to refer to the fact that it's open content (see first sentence) and collaborative, not that the content itself is similar.
You do have a point about the having to be approved to be able to edit. It wasn't very hard to get approval though.
Meetup.com has calendar feeds. You can get a calendar feed for all the events you've RSVPed "yes" to. You can get individual calendar feeds for each group's events. But there's no way to get a calendar feed of all the events happening in all of your groups.
I'm a member of something like 40 groups. The thought of manually adding each feed as a separate calendar in Thunderbird - and the thought of Thunderbird then trying to cope with the result - was... unpleasant.
So I set up a pipe to combine all the feeds into one. Very cursory googling suggested that Yahoo Pipes was the easiest way to accomplish this.
Fairly slick UI. Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes.
Unfortunately it turns out that meetup.com apparently serves 503s to requests coming from Pipes.
That's really interesting. I think it exemplifies a problem that has been bothering me for a while: for many sites, scripting and design are antipatterns designed to corral rather than enable the user and leverage branding.
I used a pipe that created RSS feeds from Google+ pages in conjunction with some other stuff to get all the articles I'd want to read in one document (with a table of contents) delivered to my kindle.
I'm now working on something that doesn't use Y! Pipes and simplifies the process.
We all knew it was coming, but the end of Pipes still sucks.
