5 Minute Hack – QR Codes from an RSS Feed

Skimming through my feeds a few minutes ago, I saw a post by Karen Coombs on the OCLC Developer blog about QR Code hacks to “mass generate QR Codes for all the web addresses of the applications in the [OCLC] Application Gallery”. The technique uses a bit of PHP to parse a feed from the gallery and create the QRcode images using the Google charts API.

If the thought of writing code doesn’t appeal to you, here’s a Yahoo pipe for achieving a similar effect – Yahoo Pipe to generate QRcodes from RSS feed item links:

[UPDATE: if you need a code equivalent of this pipe, you can always generate it using Greg Gaughan’s Pipe2Py compiler, which generates a Python programming code equivalent of a Yahoo Pipe, given the Pipe ID;-)]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: via the knows-way-more-than-I-do-about-Yahoo-pipes @hapdaniel: given the feed output URL for a pipe, for example, if we leave the _render=rss argument out, the pipe will render an unordered HTML list containing the feed items, rather than RSS. e.g. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=e65397e116d7754da0dd23425f1f0af1 gives and unordered HTML list of the output of the above pipe…]

Using the Yahoo pipes image gallery badge, or maybe the Google AJAX Feed API, you can then quickly and easily generate an embed code to display the feed in a gallery widget in your own webpage.

PS After a moment or two’s reflection, I realised there’s an even lazier approach to generating the codes: @adrianshort’s Barcode Posters service, which also generates a list of QRcodes from an RSS feed:

Easy:-)