RSS Feeds and Yahoo Pipes
Since we are talking about RSS feeds this week in 23 things Oxford blog, I would like to mention one of my favourite products called “Yahoo Pipes”. Pipes is basically a concept in Unix/Linux based operating systems which helps chain different things on the command line/console. Yahoo used the same concept to essentially combine the web (pages, feeds, and other information). To keep it simple, I will write about a simple but very useful feature of this brilliant product.
Yahoo Pipes is free to use, given that you have a Yahoo account. After that, you can access it at: Yahoo Pipes. On the top of the screen, you will see a button called “Create a Pipe”. Click on that. You will be presented with the screen shown below:
Click on the “untitled” tab to rename it. In this case, I am renaming it to “My First Pipe”. You will notice that there are a lot of different tools to use on the left side bar. At this time, we will only use a limited number of these but feel free to explore them further if you want to. You will also see a main user area where you drag and work with modules. On the bottom, you will see a debugger screen which lets you know of any possible problems and errors.
As we are working with RSS feeds this week, let’s drag a “Fetch Feed” module to our main working area. You will notice that it automatically creates a “Pipe Output” module. A “Fetch Feed” module will take an RSS feed as input, fetches the information for you, and then sends it to an output pipe. The usefulness of this will become evident as we move along with our first pipe. The screenshot below shows the progress we have made so far.
So far so good. Now let us give some feed information to our “Fetch Feed” module. As an example, let’s take an example of my blog. I write about different topics, including topics related to 23 Things Oxford. If you want to subscribe to my blog, you can get the RSS feed link, which is http://www.masudk.com/blog/feed/. You can use this link to subscribe to my blog in Google Reader. The same can be done with Yahoo Pipes. Let’s put this feed address in the “Fetch Feed” module. Once you have entered this address in the module, click and hold on the circle underneath the module and drag it all the way to the circle on top of the “Pipe Output” module. The two modules should now be connected as shown below.
Click on the “Save” button on the top right of the screen. Once your pipe is saved, you will see a link on the top middle of the screen called “Run pipe”. Click on that to see the output of your pipe. The screenshot below shows the output at this time:
You might be thinking of the advantage of this pipe. So far, it is very similar to subscribing to my blog via Google Reader and reading the posts via RSS. Now imagine that you are only interested in those posts of my blog which describe about “Things” specified in 23 Things Oxford tasks. All of my posts which relate to these tasks have the word “Thing” in their title. Let’s modify our pipe so that it can filter my posts and display only those which have the word “thing” in its title.
To do this, expand “Operators” from the left sidebar and drag and drop “Filter” module to our work area. Change the settings of the module so that it permits any post where item.title contains the word “thing”. Drag the connection so that output of “Fetch Feed” module goes into the input of ”Filter” module, and output of “Filter” module goes in the input of the “Pipe Output” module, as shown below:
Save your pipe and run it now to see the output. The output should only show posts with titles that have the word “thing” in it, as shown below:
The whole idea seems more useful now. On the output screen, you can also see the link to get an RSS feed for this pipe. You can use this link to subscribe to this pipe in your Google Reader. Similarly, you can use the same tools to subscribe to different financial newspapers but only getting the information if any post has a particular company of your interest in the title. The usage and power is practically endless.
Hope this post has been useful to you.
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Gosh it’s weird how reading this the second time round sounds much more clearer. And I think it’s because i’ve now done tasks 5 and 6 of the 23 things blog. Cos after physically going through the process of adding feeds, I can see how yahoo pipes is useful in filtering out specific information you’re interested in from a more general feed.
Your detailed description is great, but I have a feeling i’m still gonna need help creating the first pipe lol. Thank you for making this post. It’s really informative
Thanks Henna, I will be writing another post on Yahoo Pipes soon, more of a theoretical one though. Feel free to ask me any questions that you have at any time