I’ve heard about Yahoo Pipes once and my thoughts went like “Yahoo+RSS = they must be making Google Reader clone”.
Turned out to be more interesting stuff (still in beta but works fine). It’s online application to operate RSS feeds (and other data) in visual programming style. Programming without writing code. Building from blocks – like flat Lego on your screen.
Martin of gHacks had posted detailed guide on how to use it for filtering out unwanted stuff from feeds. And it got me thinking what else can I use it for. Aside from Softpedia feed (with which I followed Martin’s example happily) rest of my feeds are pretty slim and I optimize them – dropping crappy ones and adding new to see how they perform over time.
After some thinking it occurred to me that I can try to merge feeds of my blog to create huge master feed. Plenty of tinkering and I ended up with such pipe (clickable) :
I get three different feeds, append titles of feed items with their content and mix them in one feed. Could be enhanced by using category feeds and giving more meaningful descriptions.
Technology is extremely cool but I have a lot of second thoughts about publishing this feed.
- It’s complex solution and I lose good chunk of control over my feed, trusting 3rd party site to do good job.
- Lag may add up. Pipe queries blog, gets redirected to feedburner, which queries blog, makes feed, gives it to pipe, which repeats that again for another feed, than processes all of them and waits until feedburner queries to get resulting master feed. Complex.
Do you like idea of giant master feed that mixes posts, software, comments and whatever else blog owner can imagine? Or do you prefer to chose parts of content you find most interesting and subscribe to it with separate feeds?
Tell me in the comments.
PS yeah, I shamelessly borrowed “Tell me in the comments” from Martin. Phrase seems to work really well for him. Or maybe that’s half million monthly readers effect. :)
Screenshoting for blog - making a shot
Engineering Windows 7 - ray of real news on OS future
Follow tags on Delicious with cleaned up RSS feeds
Scrape headings into RSS with Yahoo Query Language
Weeding dead RSS feeds with processing OPML
SuggestRSS.com – finds sites like those in your feeds
Google Page Speed vs Yahoo YSlow
It’s probably the readers more than the line ;) And it’s close to a million, hehe.
I think that the biggest turn down is the delay. I have not played around with the other options yet, like user input but I have a huge idea in my head on how to make a cool new site using Yahoo Pipes. If you are interested i fill you in, just mail me ;)
I am always interested in new shiny toys. :)
I’m a little confused.
I dont see a quick explanation of what you can do with the pipe output.
Can you link it to a blog, a website, and more? Or does it just go to some yahoo repository that you can view?
@Don Clark
Main way to use pipe is to get output as RSS feed. There are other (PHP, JSON) output formats available but RSS is probably easiest to work with.
You can do whatever you want with resulting feed – subscribe in your feed reader, embed on web site (with help of some coding/plugin/widget), etc.
RSS is rather flexible format.