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Put that in your Yahoo pipe and smoke it! November 26, 2008

Posted by Steve Boneham in : HowTo, projects, RSS, JISC , trackback

IRET Pipe

I’m no web programmer (I don’t even have a beard), but I do appreciate the clever things they do that with a little hacking can make me look clever too! From JavaScript libraries to netvibes widgets and open-source Flash video players, you can go a long way without really programming. But when recently I needed to aggregate some RSS feeds, then filter, truncate and modify them, I thought I was in for some long nights of coding. That’s until I found out how easy this stuff is with Yahoo Pipes.

Pipes lets you mashup and manipulate web content through a simple graphical interface. So rather than writing lines of code, you simply drag & drop blocks from a code library and change a few parameters [see image above or view the pipe].

Pipes has been around a while, but the first time I found a need to use it in anger was for the JISC-IRET support project I’m working on. We needed a way to syndicate content from each of the project blogs to a portal we were building on Netvibes. It’s easy to add each blog feed individually, but we felt that a ‘latest from the projects’ block would be good for the homepage and blog sidebars.

To create this, what we needed to do was:

It was surprisingly easy to apply this logic in Pipes. Most of the blocks are self-explanatory. For example, ‘FetchFeed’ fetches a feed, ‘Truncate feed after’ truncates after a set number of posts - you get the idea. The only complicated block was Regex, which takes the title of a post as a string and appends the name of the blog to it.

Once you’ve designed your pipe, publishing it creates a public web  page with an RSS feed which you can then syndicate elsewhere - such as to the JISC-IRET blog and JISC-IRET portal.

I’m sure some of my more bearded friends will view this crude attempt at web programming with disdain, but perhaps what they should be moer worried about is that services such as Yahoo Pipes might just turn some ordinary web users into wanabee programmers who can do things for themselves.

Comments»

1. Hector Peebles - November 26, 2008

Nice one Steve!
I’ve messed around in Pipes a few times and find it an incredibly useful tool. I don’t think it’s underated (who ever uses it tends to love it!) but for some reason it seems to be fairly overlooked. It’s been out for ages but why oh why aren’t more people getting stuck in with it…?