The Footie Fool

As a Canuck soccer fan, you know it can sometimes take a lot of work to track the progress of our players in all the leagues they play in around the world. To help, I thought I would share a tool that I use to help me keep track of the comings and goings of the players on the MNT. I hope you find it useful, too.

Last night I created a new page on the site – a live feed of news stories about prominent Canadian soccer players. I use this as a basic web monitoring service to get a quick snapshot of what is being published about Canadian players. Geek details are below, if you are interested.

So, first off, some caveats about this mashup.

• This is an automatically generated list that carries out a news search on Google for players names. As a result, expect to see some stories that come up that a) have nothing to do with soccer and b) are in foreign languages (Spanish, German, Danish and Romanian, specifically).
• It is not comprehensive. Basically I put out what Google returns, and you would be surprised at what it misses. A lot of your fave Canadian footie blogs, for example, are not always represented. So think of this as a supplement, not a replacement to meet your minimum nutritional requirements of Canadian footie news.
• The list relies on free tools (notable Google Alerts, Google Reader and Yahoo Pipes) . It may not be fast. Sometimes it might not even work.

I’ll continue to tweak the feed over the next few days to try to eliminate some of the non footie stories that show up. Stories like games played at L. Dale Mitchell baseball park, or about musician Will Johnson of Centro-Matic. The feed does not discriminate right now. I’ll do my best to get rid of those types of stories.

At any rate, I throw this out there as a service to my fellow Canuck footie fans. Hopefully you find it useful to keep track of what/how our boys are doing.

The geek stuff? Okay, you might want to do something similar to this if you are technically inclined. First step is to create a list of news alerts using a service called Google Alerts. I use the players names as the search criteria (the list of players included is on the news feed page, but it’s most of the people you would expect to be there. If I am missing someone please let me know). The results are aggregated in a folder in another Google product, Google Reader. I pump that Google Reader feed to my public Google Reader page here. Then comes the cleaning. I take the RSS feed from that page and pull it into Yahoo Pipes. This is where I add filters,  remove duplicates and pair down the feed to the most recent 30 stories. I spit out the final result as a Yahoo Pipe badge, which then gets pulled into my blog as the page you see.