As noted a couple months ago, the Local Signal aggregator was being blocked by Yelp. I don’t blame them, they are within their rights to do so, even if I didn’t think it was in their best interest. On the plus side, they were responsive and presented a solution which included moving to a dedicated IP and signing some contract. Well, this is a hobby project for now and I didn’t see the need to do either of those, to just consume RSS feeds.
So, I looked into other workarounds, as I feel that since Yelp is the market leader, it’s important to get those reviews aggregated. I ended up using Yahoo Pipes, a wonderful mashup tool, to use as a feed proxy. Net result, Yelp feeds are now back on the each city’s “Places” tab. Enjoy.
With the Yelp issue, I thought it would be a good idea to explain the places tab a bit. The “places” tab (see Bend, Oregon’s places for an example) is meant to represent interesting places to check out in the city, be it tourist attractions, local restaurants, businesses and anything else. The primary services, besides Yelp that are used for this tab include Platial, 43 Places, 1000 Things To-Do (where available), and Yahoo Travel (though many of their feeds appear to be sick).
If you know of other great services, drop me a line at rwilliamz@gmail.com.
Despite the status as a “preview release” which essentially means pre-alpha, and the fact that feeds are aggressively cached to reduce load on the services being aggregated, we’ve already managed to get blocked by Yelp. They do have an API, so it looks like it would be best to migrate to that soon. So, for the time being, no Yelp feeds will be available on each city’s “places” tab (for example: Portland’s places).
