In the Pipeline

When Yahoo! Pipes launched in early 2007, I didn’t quite understand what it was right off the bat. A bit more investigation and seeing examples helped me with that but I didn’t think about building anything until late last year. I had come across something (I forget what) and someone had mentioned that they wished they had a feed for some of my combined output.

I went back to Pipes and played around with it some. It’s remarkably simple to use especially if you’re a visual person. It takes XML/RSS feeds and puts them together or creates mash-ups of data, which is actually a lot of fun. I don’t see it being used as often enough perhaps but now that I’ve played with it, I wish it were.

Back to what someone had mentioned to me about my output: I made a masterfeed of sorts that combines Flickr, Twitter, Absenter, Weightshift and this site. That feed is here. I believe you can look at it on the web here and see the source.

My masterfeed pipe. You can view a larger version here.

It’s actually really dead simple. You use the variety of functions, expressions and attributes on the left in the editing window. Yahoo! has made this simple by even giving you pre-configured functions like “Fetch Feed,” which I used. Drag that function into the editor and feed it into the operator, Union. Pipe Output is immediately added when you add a module so no worries there. However, now that you’ve found your sources and joined them, is there anything else to do? Well, if you care about the order or appearance the sources come in, you can add a Sort operator to the mix, before the Pipe Output. I’ve sorted by publication date in descending order.

You’ll see the results of your handiwork in the debugger window below. Save your pipe. Once saved, you’ll see a web version of the pipe with which you can add to a variety of services, play with the RSS or use that to output further into an application or system.