Ah, regex – when put in a flowchart GUI like Yahoo Pipes it makes things a lot easier. My newest pride and joy, the Digg stupidity filter, gives a global RSS feed that removes the following post types:
- Posts containing the word “digg”. These articles are usually meta-references and if there’s one thing I can’t stand reading more than Digg comments, it’s about how Digg is gaining acceptance among the mass media. To avoid using a slightly more colourful phrase, it’s a circle-…backrub of gigantic proportions.
- Posts containing [PIC], [PICS], or [Picture]. Yay! No more LOLCats cluttering my news. The best thing that’s ever come out of that meme is LOLrus, and only because the name’s clever.
- Posts containing “Ron Paul”. Beside being Canadian and therefore indifferent about American politics, I don’t want to see an army of Internet fanboys discussing how he saves orphans from burning buildings when there is no chance in hell he’ll get elected. It’s armchair activism at its finest. Wake me up when Stephen Colbert, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bill Clinton (yes, again) get into power.
- Posts containing “marijuana”. Maybe I’m not into the whole stoner subculture, but I can’t be bothered to care about the oh-so-wonderful benefits of hemp while reading news at work.
- Finally, the filter excludes posts matching the regex
.*(\!|\?|\.|\:){2}to eliminate any articles containing two or more punctuation symbols in a row. This takes out a LOT of potential overhyped, moronic and inane articles because the submitter doesn’t know about our good friend Mr. Period (NSFW text.)
My next project, when I get the time, will be to find a way to filter all-caps articles with regex or another string tool. So far, the regex capabilities on Pipes don’t seem to be case-sensitive, or my syntax set isn’t matching what the site expects.
Are there any other terms you’d like to see removed from Digg stories, or other suggestions for filtered feeds?