Citation Workflow – Diigo/Pinterest to Google SS

Talking to Bud the other day he mentioned that generating the citation page for his digital stories was something of a pain. I’ve thought about it a bit since then and decided to try to simplify a workflow for this.

Odd thing I learned – – CHAR(10) is the official way to get line breaks in Google Spreadsheet formulas.

Flickr to Diigo to Google Spreadsheets

Initially, I looked at the Flickr galleries because that’s the option that Bud normally uses. I saw that the gallery was in a standard HTML list format and I had some hope. Google spreadsheets lets you pull lists and tables like these in via the IMPORTHTML function. Martin Hawksey has some good instructions and examples over here. So that failed but I could import just about every other list on the page.

So, I decided doing this through Diigo would make pretty decent sense for a number of people.

Assuming you choose a unique tag for the images you plan to use- this example just uses “flickr”, I’d suggest something story/movie specific. So the basic Diigo URL you’d get is https://www.diigo.com/user/bionicteaching/flickr. Trying to make this really easy for people, I set up the first page to allow you to paste that URL in and our friendly formulas transform it into https://www.diigo.com/rss/user/bionicteaching/flickr.

The example linked here reformats the RSS feed into something like what’s below. Making it really easy to cut/paste into credits or publish as a webpage and link to in your video description. With minor effort you could make it even prettier or assume a different format. If it interests you, click here and choose FILE>MAKE A COPY to have one of your very own.

"KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA | Flickr - Photo Sharing!
By user: edbatista

Retrieved on Sun, 30 Mar 2014 00:31:25 +0000"

Pinterest to Google Spreadsheets

I did get to thinking that Diigo is not the most visual of bookmarking options and wondered if I might be able to do something similar using Pinterest. Turns out, only sort of.

You can get the RSS feed in no problem. You just add RSS to the end of the board URL and you’ve got a feed. It loads fine into the spreadsheet . . . but it doesn’t hold much info.

You can get the date/time of pinning, the description, and the URL to the pit itself (which does site the source and provide a link back to the original- but none of that is in the RSS feed).

I’m not overly impressed. I may revisit later with a little more effort and something beyond a vanilla Google spreadsheet. In any case, if you want a copy here it is.