Creating a feed with Yahoo Pipes
I’ve seen several mentions of Yahoo Pipes, and played with it once but never really spent any time to make something worth while. But today, since I had some time on my hands, I decided to take another stab at it and I was pretty pleased with what I could whip up.
Yahoo Pipes is a way to consolidate feeds and add some logic to it. What is cool about it, is that Yahoo has put alot of features into it and wrapped it all into a slick GUI package.
For my example, I created a Cooking Pipe, so I could scan the new recipes to see if anything caught my eye.
First off, log onto Yahoo Pipes. Here is where we will create our first pipe.
Now we get our feeds. I used some feeds from cooking sites I frequent:
- http://www.epicurious.com/services/rss/feeds/newrecipes.xml - From Epicurious.com
- http://www.epicurious.com/services/rss/feeds/LatestFeatures.xml - From Epicurious.com
- http://www.epicurious.com/services/rss/feeds/dailydish.xml - From Epicurious.com
- http://feeds.101cookbooks.com/101cookbooks - From 101cookbooks.com
- http://feeds.feedburner.com/elise/simplyrecipes - From SimplyRecipes.com
We will now add these feeds to the pipe. Drag the Fetch Feed Icon to the workspace. Add each feed to the box (click “+” next to URL to add more feeds). Now create a link between the Fetch Feed box and the Pipe Output box. We now have a working pipe:
If you’ve done everything right, you should have output in the Debugger pane (at the bottom).
But, looking through the feed, I see alot of seafood recipes. I dislike seafood, so I don’t want to see any recipes about it. Here is where the power of Pipes come in.
We are going to add a filter for the types of seafood I don’t want to see. We’ll do this by clicking on Operators, and then choose the filter box. Now we can set that filter box to block any thing that would indicate a seafood recipe. In this example, I am just looking for the words fish, shrimp, mussel, or salmon in the title of the article. There are ALOT of options to filter on and you could get very sophisticated with this, but we’ll keep this example simple. 
We now have a pipe that gives us recipes, but filters out (most) seafood recipes.
Now you can clone this (or any public) pipe and customize it to meet your needs. This just barely scratches the surface of what pipes are capable of. For some more complex examples, browse the pipes and see what people have created…
May 12th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
That is pretty cool. I like how you can apply intelligence to how and what you want to see. On another pipe I found the ability to sort the feed by item publication date. I also like the fact that you can share these pipes, so that other people interested in the same stuff you are can copy the work you’ve done and add to it.